ries. And there is much to be said for any change
that would bring about this result. Without constant help from the
philologist, anthropology is bound to languish. To thoroughly
understand the speech of the people under investigation is the
field-worker's master-key; so much so, that the critic's first
question in determining the value of an ethnographical work must always
be, Could the author talk freely with the natives in their own tongue?
But how is the study of particular languages to be pursued successfully,
if it lack the stimulus and inspiration which only the search for
general principles can impart to any branch of science? To relieve
the hack-work of compiling vocabularies and grammars, there must be
present a sense of wider issues involved, and such issues as may
directly interest a student devoted to language for its own sake. The
formal method of investigating language, in the meantime, can hardly
supply the needed spur. Analysis is all very well so long as its
ultimate purpose is to subserve genesis--that is to say, evolutionary
history. If, however, it tries to set up on its own account, it is
in danger of degenerating into sheer futility. Out of time and history
is, in the long run, out of meaning and use. The philologist, then,
if he is to help anthropology, must himself be an anthropologist, with
a full appreciation of the importance of the historical method. He
must be able to set each language or group of languages that he studies
in its historical setting. He must seek to show how it has evolved
in relation to the needs of a given time. In short, he must correlate
words with thoughts; must treat language as a function of the social
life.

* * * * *

Here, however, it is not possible to attempt any but the most general
characterization of primitive language as it throws light on the
workings of the primitive intelligence. For one reason, the subject
is highly technical; for another reason, our knowledge about most types
of savage speech is backward in the extreme; whilst, for a third and
most far-reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have seen, are
not speaking the language truly native to their powers and habits of
mind, but are expressing themselves in terms imported from another
stock, whose spiritual evolution has been largely different. Thus it
is at most possible to contrast very broadly and generally the more
rudimentary with the more advanced methods t