essity, or as a matter of fact, dolichocephalic skulls had
anything to do with Aryan, mesophalic with Semitic, or brachycephalic
with Turanian speech, was nothing but the wildest random thought. It
could convey no rational meaning whatever; we might as well say that
all painters were dolichocephalic, and all musicians brachycephalic,
or that all lophocomic tribes worked in gold, and all lisocomic tribes
in silver. If anything must be ascribed to prehistoric times, surely
the differentiation of the human skull, the human hair and the human
skin would have to be ascribed to that distant period. No one, he
believed, had ever maintained that a mesocephalic skull was split or
differentiated into a dolichocephalic and a brachycephalic variety in
the bright sunshine of history. Nevertheless, he had felt for years
that knowledge of languages must be considered in future as a _sine
qua non_ for every anthropologist. How few of the books in which we
trusted with regard to the characteristic peculiarities of savage
races had been written by men who had lived among them for ten or
twenty years, and who had learned their languages till they could
speak them as well as the natives themselves. It was no excuse to say
that any traveler who had eyes to see and ears to hear could form a
correct estimate of the doings and sayings of savage tribes.

TRAVELERS' IMPRESSIONS.

It was not so, as anthropologists knew from sad experience. Suppose a
traveler came to a camp where he saw thousands of men and women
dancing round the image of a young bull. Suppose that the dancers were
all stark naked, that after a time they began to fight, and that at
the end of their orgies there were three thousand corpses lying about
weltering in their blood. Would not a casual traveler have described
such savages as worse than the negroes of Dahomey? Yet these savages
were really the Jews, the chosen people of God. The image was the
golden calf, the priest was Aaron, and the chief who ordered the
massacre was Moses. We might read the 32d chapter of Exodus in a very
different sense. A traveler who could have conversed with Aaron and
Moses might have understood the causes of the revolt and the necessity
of the massacre. But without this power of interrogation and mutual
explanation, no travelers, however graphic and amusing their stories
might be, could be trusted; no statements of theirs could be used by
the anthropologist for truly scientific purposes. If ant