But the most instructive example of the fallacy which may attach to merely philological reasonings, is that afforded by the Feejeans, who are, physically, so intimately connected with the adjacent Negritos of 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.

1.  HOMO.  Nosce te ipsum.  Sapiens. 1.  H. diurnus:  varians cultura, loco. Ferus.  Tetrapus, mutus, hirsutus.

* * * * *

Americanus [Greek:  a].  Rufus, cholericus, rectus—­Pilis
                               nigris, rectis, crassis—­Naribus
                               patulis—­Facie ephelitica: 
                               Mento subimberbi.
                               Pertinax, contentus, liber. Pingit
                               se lineis daedaleis rubris.
                               Regitur Consuetudine.

Europaeus [Greek:  b].  Albus sauguineus torosus. Pilis
                               flavescentibus, prolixis.
                               Oculis caeruleis.
                               Levis, argutus, inventor.
                               Tegitur Vestimentis arctis.
                               Regitur Ritibus.

Asiaticus [Greek:  g].  Luridus, melancholicus, rigidus.
                               Pilis nigricantibus. Oculis
                               fuscis. Severus, fastuosus, avarus.
                               Tegitur Indumentis laxis.
                               Regitur Opinionibus.