orders, founded upon a consideration of the whole complicate structure of the things classified, contemplating the sum of their characteristic qualities; fixing, therefore, their position in the vast kingdom of nature of which they are members, and determining the names by which they shall be called. The genetical classification is the ultimate historical fact which the historical method of linguistic study directly aims at establishing. With its establishment are bound up those more general historical results, for the ethnological history of mankind, which form so conspicuous a part of the interest of our science.
To subjects connected with this department of interest, the bearing of linguistic science on ethnology, we have next to turn our attention, occupying with them the remainder of the present lecture.
One of the first considerations which will be apt to strike the notice of any one who reviews our classification of human races according to the relationship of their languages, is its non-agreement with the current divisions based on physical characteristics. The physicists, indeed, are far from having yet arrived at accordance in their own schemes of classification, and the utter insufficiency of that old familiar distinction of Caucasian, Mongol, Malay, African, and American, established by Blumenbach, and probably learned by most of us at school, is now fully recognized. But it does not seem practicable to lay down any system of physical races which shall agree with any possible scheme of linguistic races. Indo-European, Semitic, Scythian, and Caucasian tongues are spoken by men whom the naturalist would not separate from one another as of widely diverse stock; and, on the other hand, Scythian dialects of close and indubitable relationship are in the mouths of peoples who differ as widely in form and feature as Hungarians and Lapps; while not less discordance of physical type is to be found among the speakers of various dialects belonging to more than one of the other great linguistic families.
Such facts as these call up the question, as one of high practical consequence, respecting the comparative value of linguistic and of physical evidence of race, and how their
