anatomists, and mathematicians. In current language, ethnography and ethnology are often used indiscriminately; but if a distinction be made between them, an instinctive perception teaches us to speak of ethnographic facts and ethnological theories, of ethnographic literature and ethnological science-ethnology being related to ethnography as the wine to the grape.

ETHNOLOGY (Gr. ethnos, nation or race, and logos, discourse), a term applied to the science that treats of the persistent modifications of the human family or group; their most marked physical, mental, and moral characteristics when compared one with the other; their present geographical distribution on the globe; their history traced backwards to the earliest attainable point; and, finally, the languages of the various nations and tribes of mankind, existing or extinct, classified and compared, with the view, by their means, of determining the chief points of resemblance or dissimilarity among the nations of the earth. This science has gradually outgrown its name. It has been therefore deemed expedient to apply to it a term of wider and more neutral significancenamely, anthropology-derived from the Greek anthropos, man, and logos, a discourse. The term ethnology has this inconvenience, that it means no more than the "science of races," and many authorities not only deny the existence of races of mankind, affirming that what are called races are in reality distinct species, but others argue that the term is as applicable to any races-e.g., races of dogs, or cats, or pigeons -as to the races of mankind. Hence the more exact and less sectarian term anthropology has been applied to denote the science that treats of the natural history of man. The science is divided into three branches-1. Zoological anthropology, which treats of the relations of man to the brute creation; 2. Descriptive anthropology, or ethnography, which classifies and describes the various divisions and subdivisions of mankind, and marks out their geographical distribution; 3. General anthropology, which M. Broca calls "the biology of the human race," which, says a recent writer on the subject, "borrows and collates from all sciences facts and phenomena usually investigated in men as individuals, but which relate to men as groups of individuals," and compares these with other facts relating to other groups of individuals. The study and bare description of a single negro's skull is mere human anatomy; the study of a group of negroes' skulls, and the description and comparison of their peculiarities with those of groups of skulls belonging to other races, would be a specimen of the work done by general anthropology.

No one can look at an Englishman, a red Indian, and a negro, without at once notioing the differences between the three, not only as regards the color of their skin, but the shape of the skull, the texture of the hair, and the character of the several features, as eyes, lips, nose, and cheek-bones. What strikes the ordinary observer chiefly is, of course, the difference of complexion; but the anatomist is fully as much interested in the shape of the skull. The first thoroughly scientific writer who endeavored to lay down a method of distinguishing between the different races of mankind by a comparison of the shape and size of the skull was Peter Camper, a distinguished Dutch anatomist of last century. He laid down a technical rule for ascertaining the facial line, and determining the amount of the facial angle, which he has thus described: "The basis on which the distinction of nations is founded may be displayed by two straight lines, one of which is to be drawn through the meatus auditorius to the base of the nose, and the other touching the prominent center of the forehead, and falling thence on the most advancing part of the upper jaw-bone, the head being viewed in profile. In the angle produced by these two lines may be said to consist not only the distinctions between the skulls of the several species of animals, but also those which are found to exist between different nations." The heads of birds display the smallest angle, and it apparently becomes of greater extent "in proportion as the animal approaches more nearly to the human figure. Thus, there is one species of the ape-tribe in which the head has a facial angle of 42 deg.; in another animal of the same family, which is one of those simiæ most approximating in figure to mankind, the facial angle contains exactly 50 deg. Next to this is the head of the African negro, which, as well as that of the Kalmuck, forms an angle of 70 deg.; while the angle discovered in the heads of Europeans contains 80 deg. On this difference of 10 deg. in the facial angle, the superior beauty of the European depends; while that high character of sublime beauty which is so striking in some works of ancient statuary, as in the head of Apollo, and in the Medusa of Sisocles, is given by an angle which amounts to 100 deg." The nearer the facial angle approached a right angle, the greater was held to be the intellectual development of the race. But M. Jacquart, of the natural history museum in Paris, showed that the facial angle in stupid people very often approached closely a right angle, and that, in the homogeneous population of Paris, the facial angle varied within wider limits than those Camper stated as a criterion of distinct species.

Camper's method was abandoned for the vertical method, or norma verticalis, invented by Blumenbach. The object being to collect the greatest number of charac teristics The best way," says Blumenbach, "of obtaining this end is to place a series of skulls with the cheek-bones on the same horizontal line resting on the lower jaws; and then viewing them from behind, and fixing the eye on the vertex of each, to mark all the varieties in the shape of parts that contribute most to the national character,

Ethnology.

whether they consist in the direction of the maxillary and malar bones, in the breadth or narrowness of the oval figure presented by the vertex, or in the flattened or vaulted form of the frontal bone." Founding upon this mode of admeasurement applied to a large collection of skulls of different nations, accumulated by himself, Blumenbach classified the human family into the following five varieties-viz., the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay, and American. In the first of these-which he made to include the Caucasians or Circassians proper, the Celts, the Teutons, the Shemites, the Libyan family, the Nilotic family, and the Hindustanic family-the skull is large and oval, the forehead expanded, the nasal bones arched, the chin full, and the teeth vertical. In the second-which embraces the Chinese and Indo-Chinese, the natives of the polar regions, the Mongol Tartars, and the Turks-the skull is oblong, but flattened at the sides, the forehead low and receding, the nose broad and short, and the cheek-bones broad and flat, with salient zygomatic arches. In the third-embracing the Negroes, Kafirs, Hottentots, Australians, Alforians and Oceanic Negroes-the skull is long and narrow, the forehead low, the nose broad and flat, the cheek-bones prominent, the jaws projecting like a muzzle, the lips thick, and the chin small. In the fourth-embracing the Malays and Polynesians generally-the skull is high and square, the forehead low, the nose short and broad, and the jaws projecting. In the fifth-embracing the American family and the Toltican family-the skull is small, with the apex high, and the back part flat, the forehead receding, the cheek-bones high, the nose aquiline, the mouth large, and the lips tumid.

This classification of the human family, with the added characteristics, under each class, of complexion, hair, and eyes, is, upon the whole, the most popular, Blumenbach having taken considerable pains to elaborate it, and present it to the world in a form acceptable to scientific inquirers. Later researches, however, have proved it to be not quite tenable. Thus, Cuvier reduced the five classes of Blumenbach to three-viz., the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian, treating the Malay and American as subdivisions of the Mongolian. Jacquinot does the same. Dr. Prichard, who brought to the study of E. not only a large acquaintance with physiology, but a considerable knowledge of languages, admits a greater number of varieties than Blumenbach, but divides his Caucasian class into two independent groups, which he calls the Syro-Arabian or Semitic, and the Aryan or Indo-Germanic. Moreover, he objects to the term Caucasian, as representing the notion that mankind had their origin on mountain heights. For him self, Prichard holds with the view that it was rather on the banks of large rivers and their estuaries that the primitive nations developed themselves. "The cradles or nurseries of the first nations, of those at least who became populous, and have left a name celebrated in later times, appear to have been extensive plains or valleys, traversed by navigable channels, and irrigated by perennial and fertilizing streams. Three such regions were the scenes of the earliest civilization of the human race, of the first foundation of cities, of the earliest political institutions, and of the invention of the arts which embellish human life. In one of these, the Semitic or Syro-Arabian nations exchanged the simple habits of wandering shepherds for the splendor and luxury of Nineveh and Babylon. In a second, the Indo-European or Japetic people brought to perfection the most elaborate of human dialects, destined to become in after-times, and under different modifications, the mother-tongue of the nations of Europe. In a third, the land of Ham, watered by the Nile, were invented hieroglyphical literature, and the arts in which Egypt far surpassed all the rest of the world in the earlier ages of history." Dr. Prichard, in his well-known Natural History of Man, commences with a description of these three divisions of the human race, not as discriminated one from the other by the form of the skull, but as comprising nearly all the civilized communities, and indeed most of the tribes of people known to antiquity. "They were neither nomades nor savages, nor do they display in their crania either of the forms principally belonging to races in those different states of existence. They had all heads of an oval or ellipticospherical form, which are observed to prevail chiefly among nations who have their faculties developed by civilization." As they cannot, however, by any means be made to comprehend all the types of man, after the Egyptians, he describes the great body of the nations of Africa, embracing tribes sunk in the lowest state of degradation; and after the Aryans, or Indo-Europeans, the people of high Asia, chiefly nomades, inhabiting vast steppes, and never rising in the scale of civilization beyond the condition of wandering shepherds, though in this capacity possessing some wealth, and acquainted with the use of clothing, tents, and wagons. These classes of nations," he observes, "have different physical characters. Among the African savages we find the prognathous form of the head and all its accompaniments; and these traits display themselves in proportion to the moral and physical degradation of the race. In Northern Asia, most of the inhabitants have the pyramidal and broad-faced skulls." Referring our readers to the articles ARYAN RACE, EGYPT, and SHEMITIC NATIONS respectively, for more detailed information on the subject of these three grand divisions of mankind, we shall here only notice Dr. Prichard's subdivisions of one of them, namely, the Aryan race.

The great Aryan or Indo-European race, which extends itself from the mouth of the Ganges to the British islands and the northern extremities of Scandinavia, divides itself, according to Prichard, into two branches—viz., the parent stock in Asia, and the colonies that it successively sent forth into Europe. The Asian branch comprises: 1. Hin