he
same series of events taking place as in Egypt, Peru, Mexico, &c. The
principal evidence in support of this somewhat startling theory is the
similarity between the words in use in Japanese and in certain African
languages. But if evidence of that nature is to be accepted in proof
of somewhat improbable theories, it will be possible to prove almost
anything in regard to the origin of races. I utterly reject all these
far-fetched theories. Any unprejudiced man looking at the Japanese,
the Chinaman, and the Korean will have no doubt whatever in his own
mind as to their racial affinity. Differences there most certainly
are, just as there are between the Frenchman and the Englishman, or
even the Englishman and the Scotchman, but what I may term the
pronounced characteristics are the same--the colour of the skin, the
oblique eyes, the dark hair, and the contour of the skull. These
people, whatever the present difference in their mental, moral, and
physical characteristics, have quite evidently all come from the same
stock. They are, in a word, Mongolians, and any attempt to prove that
one particular portion of this stock is Turano-African, or something
else equally absurd from an ethnological point of view, seems to me to
be positively childish. There was probably originally a mixture of
races, Malay as well as others, which has had its effect on the
peculiar temperament of the Japanese as he is to-day compared with the
Chinaman.

Of course language cannot be left out of account in the question of
the racial origin of any people, and the Japanese language has, as I
have said, long been a puzzle for the philologist. In the early times
we are told the Japanese had no written language. The language in use
before the opening up of communications with Korea and China stood
alone. Indeed there is only one language outside Japan which has any
affinity therewith, that is the language of the inhabitants of the
Loo-Choo Islands. Philologists have excluded the language from the
Aryan and Semitic tongues, and included it in the Turanian group. It
is said to possess all the characteristics of the Turanian family
being agglutinated, that is to say, maintaining its roots in their
integrity without formative prefixes, poor in conjunctions, and
copious in the use of participles. It is uncertain when alphabetical
characters were introduced into Japan, but it is believed to have
happened when intercourse with Korea was first opened about th