The science of the ethnologer is strictly a physical science.
He has to deal with purely physical phenomena; his business lies with
the different varieties of the human body, and specially, to take that
branch of his inquiries which most impresses the unlearned, with the
various conformations of the human skull. His researches differ in
nothing from those of the zooelogist or the palaeontologist, except that
he has to deal with the physical phenomena of man, while they deal with
the physical phenomena of other animals. He groups the different races
of men, exactly as the others group the genera and species of living or
extinct mammals or reptiles. The student of ethnology as a physical
science may indeed strengthen his conclusions by evidence of other
kinds, evidence from arms, ornaments, pottery, modes of burial. But all
these are secondary; the primary ground of classification is the
physical conformation of man himself. As to language, the ethnological
method, left to itself, can find out nothing whatever. The science of
the ethnologer then is primarily physical; it is historical only in that
secondary sense in which palaeontology, and geology itself, may fairly be
called historical.
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