ism is another
question."--Vol. ii. p. 317.

And more of an equally attractive and comprehensible character.

We assure the reader that these extracts are but feeble exponents of the
peculiar power of Mr. Latham's works,--a power of unmitigated dulness.
What his views are on the great questions of the science--the origin
of races, the migrations, the crossings of varieties, and the like--no
mortal can remember, who has penetrated the labyrinth of his researches.

An author of a very different kind is Professor Waiz, whose work on
Anthropology has just reached this country: a writer as philosophic as
Mr. Latham is disconnected; as pleasing and natural in style as the
other is affected; as simply open to the true and good in all customs or
superstitions of barbarous peoples as the Englishman is contemptuous of
everything not modern and European. Waiz seems to us the most careful
and truly scientific author in the field of Ethnology whom we have
had since Prichard, and with the wider scope which belongs to the
intellectual German.

The bane of this science, as every one knows, has been its theorizing,
and its want of careful inductive reasoning from facts. The
classifications in it have been endless, varying almost with the fancies
of each new student; while every prominent follower of it has had some
pet hypothesis, to which he desired to suit his facts. Whether the
_a priori_ theory were of modern miraculous origin or of gradual
development, of unity or of diversity of parentage, of permanent and
absolute divisions of races or of a community of blood, it has equally
forced the author to twist his facts.

Perhaps the basest of all uses to which theory has been put in this
science was in a well-known American work, where facts and fancies in
Ethnology were industriously woven together to form another withe about
the limbs of the wretched African slave.

Waiz has reasoned slowly and carefully from facts, considering in
his view all possible hypotheses,--even, for instance, the
development-theory of Darwin,--and has formed his own conclusion on
scientific data, or has wisely avowed that no conclusion is possible.

The classification to which he is forced is that which all profound
investigators are approaching,--that of language interpreted by history.
He is compelled to believe that no physiological evidences of race can
be considered as at all equal to the evidences from language. At the
same time, he is ready to