the antiquity of some made accessible Course made tion of ✓ only a further d makes a in Europe", the first fruits sts east and west sian War. o to the year 1871.58 n the consideration that merely a single original res favorable to its gradual → to its essential coherence. pointed out, were realized only orm in character and temperate y in the great grass lands of the ion of these accord with the linographical range and pastoral habit d may very likely be found to account he was inclined to indicate as the reat plains of southeastern Europe. on of a geographical factor into the controPacteristic of a great contemporary movement phy, the first extension of which to criticism of is the essay of J. Schmidt published in 1872,59 a paper of F. Ratzel in 1904. But this anticipates 2. Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Menschheit, Stuttgart, Jo, Forschungen in Gebiete der alten Völkerkunde, Berlin, 1871. Schmidt, Die Verwandschaftsverhältnisse der IndogermanSprachen, Weimar, 1872. or abode. Crawfurd's sketch of aboriginal Polynesian society and culture deals mainly, it is true, with material arts and means of subsistence; and Von Klaproth's52 application of the same method in 1830 to Indo-European languages turned on the names of plants. Eichhoff was the first to show, by systematic parallel lists of words for the family and society, how "this rich and tenacious civilization propagated itself in a thousand different degrees, but always in similar stocks and in regular ramifications, over the enormous area that civilization now covers, and whose borders are daily extending"; but it was Kuhn53 in 1845 who finally wedded comparative philology with comparative law, by his proposal "to advance from the conclusion that all these great peoples are related to one another, to a further conclusion, the establishment of the main features of the state of the original people in the days before they separated." Kuhn's work, however, brilliant as it was, was superseded within three years by a philologist of the first rank, Jacob Grimm,54 and it was Kuhn's second edition, which appeared in 1850, almost wholly re-written, which is the real cornerstone of linguistic paleontology; his Journal for the Comparative Philology of German, Greek and Latin55 was founded in the following year, 1851, and it is this mass of materials which underlay the first popular application of the new method to classical studies, in Mommsen's great History of Rome,56 which began to appear in 1854. Kuhn's argument was restated and carried somewhat further by Benfey, in his preface to Fick's Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen, which appeared in 1868. By 52 J. von Klaproth, Nouveau Journal Asiatique, p. 112, 1830. Asia Polyglotta 1831. .... 53 A. Kuhn, Zur ältesten Geschichte der Indo-Germanischen Völker, Berlin, 1845 (second edition, 1850), p. 2. 54 Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1848. 55 Kuhn, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete des deutschen, griechischen und lateinischen. 56 Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, Berlin, 1854. this time the archeological evidence for the antiquity of some kind of man in Europe had been summarized and made accessible in Lubbock's Pre-historic Times (1862): and this of course made impossible for ever such a position in regard to the population of Europe as had been taken by Mommsen in regard to Italy only three years before. Geiger's analysis of the Indo-European tree names, a further revision of Kuhn's work, appeared in 1871,57 and makes a positive claim for an Aryan home "somewhere in Europe", namely in central and western Germany; one of the first fruits in the long recrimination between anthropologists east and west of the Rhine, which followed the Franco-Prussian War. A further important step belongs also to the year 1871.58 Kuno was, I think, the first to lay stress on the consideration that a family of languages presupposed not merely a single original language, but geographical circumstances favorable to its gradual differentiation, and at the same time to its essential coherence. Such geographical conditions, he pointed out, were realized only by a wide featureless area, uniform in character and temperate in climate. Such areas exist only in the great grass lands of the Old World, and the distribution of these accord with the linguistic evidence as to the geographical range and pastoral habit of the primitive Aryan, and may very likely be found to account for these. Consequently he was inclined to indicate as the "Aryan Home" the great plains of southeastern Europe. Kuno's introduction of a geographical factor into the controversy is itself characteristic of a great contemporary movement in German geography, the first extension of which to criticism of the philologists is the essay of J. Schmidt published in 1872,59 and the latest a paper of F. Ratzel in 1904. But this anticipates 57 Geiger, Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Menschheit, Stuttgart, 1871. 58 Kuno, Forschungen in Gebiete der alten Völkerkunde, Berlin, 1871. 59 J. Schmidt, Die Verwandschaftsverhältnisse der Indogermanischen Sprachen, Weimar, 1872. the order of events. It was less the geographers than the ethnologists who wrecked the patriarchal theory. The Matriarchate in Southern India, Africa, and North America The patriarchal theory lasted barely fifty years. It had owed its revival, as we have seen, to two fresh branches of research, comparative jurisprudence and comparative philology, both stimulated directly by the results of European administration in northern India. It owed its decline to the results of similar inquiries in other parts of the world, stimulated no less directly by other phases of the great colonising movement, which marks, above all other things, the century from 1760 to 1860. again a small number of examples stand out as the crucial instances. British administration in India had, of course, been extended over the non-Aryan south, as well as over the north; and in Travancore, and other parts of the Madras Presidency, British commissioners found themselves confronted with types of society which showed the profoundest disregard of the patriarchal theory. Like the Lycians of Herodotus, these perverse people "called themselves after their mothers' names": they honoured their mother and neglected their father, in society, and government, as well as in their homes; their administration, their law, and their whole mode of life rested on the assumption that it was the women, not the men, in whom reposed the continuity of the family and the authority to govern the state. Here was a parecbasis, a perverted type of society, worthy of Aristotle himself. It is a type which, as a matter of fact, is widely distributed in southern and southeastern Asia, and had been repeatedly described by travellers from the days of Tavernier (in Borneo) and Laval (before 1679 in the Maldive Islands), if not earlier still. It existed also in the New World and Lafitau had already compared the Iroquois with the ancient Lycians. But it was Buchanan's account of the Nairs of the Malabar Coast, published in 1807,60 which came at the psychological moment, and 60 Buchanan, F., A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara, and Malabar, 3 vols, 1807. first attracted serious attention. At the other extremity of India, also, analogous customs were being recorded, about the same time, by Samuel Turner in Tibet, which might have given pause at the outset to the speculators who hoped to base general conclusions on anything so special and peculiar as the customs of Aryan India. Similar evidence came pouring in during the generation which followed; partly, it is true, as the result of systematic search among older travelers, but mainly through the intense exploitation of large parts of the world by European traders and colonists. Conspicuous instances are the Negro societies of western and equatorial Africa, first popularised by the republication of William Bosman's Guinea (1700), in Pinkerton's General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1808, &c.), and by Proyart's Histoire de Loango (1776), which also reached the English public in the same invaluable collection. But it was from the south that the new African material came most copiously, in proportion as the activity of explorers, missionaries, and colonists was greater. Thunberg's account of the Bechuanas takes the lead here; but for English thought the principal authorities are, of course, John Mackenzie62 and David Livingstone.63 It was not to be expected that America, which had made such remarkable contributions to the study of man in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 64 should fall behind in the nineteenth, when its vast resources of mankind, as of nature's gifts, were being realised at last. From Hunter,65 Gallatin, and School 61 Pinkerton, vol. xvi. 62 John Mackenzie, Ten Years North of the Orange River (1859-69), Edinburgh, 1871. 63 David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries (1858-64), London, 1865. 64 The harvest of the earlier period is gathered up in F. X. Charlevoix, Histoire et description de la Nouvelle France, 6 vols, Paris, 1744; Histoire de Paraguay, 6 vols, Paris, 1756. 65 Hunter, Manners and Customs of several Indian Tribes located West of the Mississippi, Philadelphia, 1823. 66 Gallatin, Archaelogia Americana, Philadelphia onwards). (from 1820 |