our thoughts to the
solution of the great problem of the first origin, since man is too
intimately associated with his own race and with the relations of time
to conceive of the existence of an individual independently of a
preceding generation and age. A solution of those difficult questions,
which can not be determined by inductive reasoning or by
experience--whether the belief in this presumed traditional condition
be actually based on historical evidence, or whether mankind inhabited
the earth in gregarious associations from the origin of the race--can
not, therefore, be determined from philological data, and yet its
elucidation ought not to be sought from other sources."

The distribution of mankind is, therefore, only a distribution into
varieties, which are commonly designated by the somewhat indefinite
term races. As in the vegetable kingdom, and in the natural history of
birds and fishes, a classification into many small families is based
on a surer foundation than where large sections are separated into a
few but large divisions, so it also appears to me that in the
determination of races a preference should be given to the
establishment of small families of nations. Whether we adopt the old
classification of my master, Blumenbach, and admit five races (the
Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Ethiopian, and Malayan), or that of
Prichard, into seven races (the Iranian, Turanian, American,
Hottentots and Bushmen, Negroes, Papuas, and Alfourous), we fail to
recognize any typical sharpness of definition, or any general or
well-established principle in the division of these groups. The
extremes of form and color are certainly separated, but without regard
to the races, which can not be included in any of these classes, and
which have been alternately termed Scythian and Allophyllic. Iranian
is certainly a less objectionable term for the European nations than
Caucasian; but it may be maintained generally that geographical
denominations are very vague when used to express the points of
departure of races, more especially where the country which has given
its name to the race, as, for instance, Turan (Mawerannahr), has been
inhabited at different periods by Indo-Germanic and Finnish, and not
by Mongolian tribes.

Languages, as intellectual creations of man, and as closely interwoven
with the development of mind, are, independently of the national form
which they exhibit, of the greatest importance in the recognition of