New Caledonia, &c., that no one can doubt to what stock they belong,
and who yet, in the form and substance of their language, are
Polynesian. The case is as remarkable as if the Canary Islands should
have been found to be inhabited by negroes speaking Arabic, or some
other clearly Semitic dialect, as their mother tongue. As it happens,
the physical peculiarities of the Feejeans are so striking, and
the conditions under which they live are so similar to those of the
Polynesians, that no one has ventured to suggest that they are merely
modified Polynesians--a suggestion which could otherwise certainly
have been made. But if languages may be thus transferred from one
stock to another, without any corresponding intermixture of blood,
what ethnological value has philology?--what security does unity of
language afford us that the speakers of that language may not have
sprung from two, or three, or a dozen, distinct sources?

Thus we come, at last, to the purely zoological method, from which
it is not unnatural to expect more than from any other, seeing that,
after all, the problems of ethnology are simply those which are
presented to the zoologist by every widely distributed animal he
studies. The father of modern zoology seems to have had no doubt upon
this point. At the twenty-eighth page of the standard twelfth edition
of the "Systema Naturae," in fact, we find:--



I. PRIMATES.


_Dentes primores incisores: superiores IV. paralleli, mammae
pectorales II._