scientific philologers.

The truth of all this cannot be called in question. We have too many
instances in recorded history of nations laying aside the use of one
language and taking to the use of another, for any one who cares for
accuracy to set down language as any sure test of race. In fact, the
studies of the philologer and those of the ethnologer strictly so called
are quite distinct, and they deal with two wholly different sets of
phenomena. The science of the ethnologer is strictly a physical science.
He has to deal with purely physical phenomena; his business lies with
the different varieties of the human body, and specially, to take that
branch of his inquiries which most impresses the unlearned, with the
various conformations of the human skull. His researches differ in
nothing from those of the zoölogist or the palæontologist, except that
he has to deal with the physical phenomena of man, while they deal with
the physical phenomena of other animals. He groups the different races
of men, exactly as the others group the genera and species of living or
extinct mammals or reptiles. The student of ethnology as a physical
science may indeed strengthen his conclusions by evidence of other
kinds, evidence from arms, ornaments, pottery, modes of burial. But all
these are secondary; the primary ground of classification is the
physical conformation of man himself. As to language, the ethnological
method, left to itself, can find out nothing whatever. The science of
the ethnologer then is primarily physical; it is historical only in that
secondary sense in which palæontology, and geology itself, may fairly be
called historical. It arranges the varieties of mankind according to a
strictly physical classification; what the language of each variety may
have been, it leaves to the professors of another branch of study to
find out.