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The languages, physical type, and moral characteristics of these races were well known: they all belonged evidently to a single family the family known to ethnologists as the Semitic. Again, the manners and customs, especially the religious customs, of the Assyrians connected then plainly with the Syrians and Phoenicians, with whose practices they were closely allied.
By this time the Ottoman Turks had begun to realize that they did not stand alone in the world; that they were, in fact, the westernmost branch of a vast band of peoples extending right across eastern Europe and Asia, from the Baltic to the Pacific and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean, to whom ethnologists have assigned the name of "Uralo-Altaic race," but who are more generally termed "Turanians."
If I have rarely ventured on their field, it is because I believe that when the Indian shall have passed away there will come far better ethnologists than I am, who will be much more obliged to me for collecting raw material than for cooking it. Two or three subjects have, it is true, tempted me into occasional commenting.
Race ruled the conditions; conditions hardly affected race; and yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet, without the clue, history was a nursery tale.
I have long been of the opinion that the music of different peoples should be given more consideration by scientists in their endeavor to trace cultural relationships. In years gone by, ethnologists have attached too little importance to the bearing which music has on their science.
I have frequently been told when advocating technical instruction, that there are objections against it from spiritual standpoints, which, as my own views do not enable me to understand them, I will not enter into. Also several authorities, not mission authorities alone, state with ethnologists that the African is incapable of learning, except during the period of childhood.
I had, for instance, classified the principal ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121. With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this?
She knew well enough what interpretations her husband's enemies those enemies whom even the grave does not silence would place upon this book; how they would turn and twist it about, and put the worst construction upon his motives, and so blur the fair mirror of his memory. Burton wrote as a scholar and an ethnologist writing to scholars and ethnologists.
Was not the surplus population driven off by famine toward warmer and more hopeful climes? Are not the Teutonic populations of England, North Germany, and the Baltic, the descendants, much intermixed, and with dialects much changed, of the portions which were left behind? This is the opinion, I believe, of several great ethnologists. Is it not true?
And yet, from the genuine racial standpoint, it was nothing of the kind. Ethnologists have proved conclusively that, apart from certain palæolithic survivals and a few historically recent Asiatic intruders, Europe is inhabited by only three stocks: The blond, long-headed "Nordic" race, the medium-complexioned, round-headed "Alpine" race, the brunet, long-headed "Mediterranean" race.
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