d nations who live in a degraded social state do actually
approach to the physical type of inferior races. However this may be,
it is quite certain, that as no man can by taking thought add a cubit
to his stature, so no man can by taking thought make his skull
brachycephalic or dolichocephalic. But the language which a man speaks
does depend upon his will; he can by taking thought make his speech
Romance or Teutonic. No doubt he has in most cases practically no
choice in the matter. The language which he speaks is practically
determined for him by fashion, habit, early teaching, a crowd of things
over which he has practically no control. But still the control is not
physical and inevitable, as it is in the case of the shape of his
skull. If we say that he cannot help speaking in a particular way;
that is, that he cannot help speaking a particular language, this
simply means that his circumstances are such that no other way of
speaking presents itself to his mind. And in many cases, he has a real
choice between two or more ways of speaking; that is, between two or
more languages. Every word that a man speaks is the result of a real,
though doubtless unconscious, act of his free will. We are apt to
speak of gradual changes in languages, as in institutions or anything
else, as if they were the result of a physical law, acting upon beings
who had no choice in the matter. Yet every change of the kind is
simply the aggregate of various acts of the will on the part of all
concerned. Every change in speech, every introduction of a new sound
or a new word, was really the result of an act of the will of some one
or other. The choice may have been unconscious; circumstances may have
been such as practically to give him but one choice; still he did
choose; he spoke in one way, when there was no physical hinderance to
his speaking in another way, when there was no physical compulsion to
speak at all. The Gauls need not have changed their own language for
Latin; the change was not the result of a physical necessity, but of a
number of acts of the will on the part of this and that Gaul. Moral
causes directed their choice, and determined that Gaul should become a
Latin-speaking land. But whether the skulls of the Gauls should be
long or short, whether their hair should be black or yellow, those were
points over which the Gauls themselves had no direct control whatever.

The study of men's skulls then is a study which is s