geological record, and this record up to the present time has yielded
but scant materials to serve in its solution.

It is known that man, highly differentiated from lower animals in
morphologic characteristics, existed in early Quaternary and perhaps in
Pliocene times, and here the discovered record ends.

LANGUAGE.

In philology, North America presents the richest field in the world, for
here is found the greatest number of languages distributed among the
greatest number of stocks. As the progress of research is necessarily
from the known to the unknown, civilized languages were studied by
scholars before the languages of savage and barbaric tribes. Again, the
higher languages are written and are thus immediately accessible. For
such reasons, chief attention has been given to the most highly
developed languages. The problems presented to the philologist, in the
higher languages, cannot be properly solved without a knowledge of the
lower forms. The linguist studies a language that he may use it as an
instrument for the interchange of thought; the philologist studies a
language to use its data in the construction of a philosophy of
language. It is in this latter sense that the higher languages are
unknown until the lower languages are studied, and it is probable that
more light will be thrown upon the former by a study of the latter than
by more extended research in the higher.

The vast field of unwritten languages has been explored but not
surveyed. In a general way it is known that there are many such
languages, and the geographic distribution of the tribes of men who
speak them is known, but scholars have just begun the study of the
languages.

That the knowledge of the simple and uncompounded must precede the
knowledge of the complex and compounded, that the latter may be rightly
explained, is an axiom well recognized in biology, and it applies
equally well to philology. Hence any system of philology, as the term is
here used, made from a survey of the higher languages exclusively, will
probably be a failure. "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit
unto his stature," and which of you by taking thought can add the
antecedent phenomena necessary to an explanation of the language of
Plato or of Spencer?

The study of astronomy, geology, physics, and biology, is in the hands
of scientific men; objective methods of research are employed and
metaphysic disquisitions find no place in the accepted phil