Critiques and Addresses by Thomas Henry Huxley

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At the present day, and notwithstanding the extensive intermixture
effected by the movements consequent on civilization and on political
changes, there is a predominance of dark men in the west, and of fair
men in the east and north, of Britain. At the present day, as from
the earliest times, the predominant constituents of the riverain
population of the North Sea and the eastern half of the British
Channel, are fair men. The fair stock continues in force through
Central Europe, until it is lost in Central Asia. Offshoots of this
stock extend into Spain, Italy, and Northern India, and by way of
Syria and North Africa, to the Canary Islands. They were known in
very early times to the Chinese, and in still earlier to the ancient
Egyptians, as frontier tribes. The Thracians were notorious for their
fair hair and blue eyes many centuries before our era.

On the other hand, the dark stock predominates in Southern and
Western France, in Spain, along the Ligurian shore, and in Western and
Southern Italy; in Greece, Asia, Syria, and North Africa; in Arabia,
Persia, Afghanistan, and Hindostan, shading gradually, through all
stages of darkening, into the type of the modern Egyptian, or of the
wild Hill-man of the Dekkan. Nor is there any record of the existence
of a different population in all these countries.

The extreme north of Europe, and the northern part of Western Asia,
are at present occupied by a Mongoloid stock, and, in the absence of
evidence to the contrary, may be assumed to have been so peopled from
a very remote epoch. But, as I have said, I can find no evidence that
this stock ever took part in peopling Britain. Of the three great
stocks of mankind which extend from the western coast of the
great Eurasiatic continent to its southern and eastern shores, the
Mongoloids occupy a vast triangle, the base of which is the whole of
Eastern Asia, while its apex lies in Lapland. The Melanochroi, on the
other hand, may be represented as a broad band stretching from Ireland
to Hindostan; while the Xanthochroic area lies between the two, thins
out, so to speak, at either end, and mingles, at its margins, with
both its neighbours.

Such is a brief and summary statement of what I believe to be the
chief facts relating to the physical ethnology of the people of
Britain. The conclusions which I draw from these and other facts are
(1) That the Melanochroi and the Xanthochroi are two separate races in
the biological sense of the word race; (2) That they have had the same
general distribution as at present from the earliest times of which
any record exists on the continent of Europe; (3) That the population
of the British Islands is derived from them, and from them only.

The people of Europe, however, owe their national names, not to
their physical characteristics, but to their languages, or to their
political relations; which, it is plain, need not have the slightest
relation to these characteristics.

Thus, it is quite certain that, in Caesar's time, Gaul was divided
politically into three nationalities--the Belgae, the Celtae, and
the Aquitani; and that the last were very widely different, both in
language and in physical characteristics, from the two former. The
Belgae and the Celtae, on the other hand, differed comparatively
little either in physique or in language. On the former point there is
the distinct testimony of Strabo; as to the latter, St. Jerome states
that the "Galatians had almost the same language as the Treviri." Now,
the Galatians were emigrant Volcae Tectosages, and therefore Celtae;
while the Treviri were Belgae.

At the present day, the physical characters of the people of
Belgic Gaul remain distinct from those of the people of Aquitaine,
notwithstanding the immense changes which have taken place since
Caesar's time; but Belgae, Celtae, and Aquitani (all but a mere
fraction of the last two, represented by the Basques and the Britons)
are fused into one nationality, "le peuple Francais." But they have
adopted the language of one set of invaders, and the name of another;
their original names and languages having almost disappeared.
Suppose that the French language remained as the sole evidence of
the existence of the population of Gaul, would the keenest philologer
arrive at any other conclusion than that this population was
essentially and fundamentally a "Latin" race, which had had some
communication with Celts and Teutons? Would he so much as suspect the
former existence of the Aquitani?

Community of language testifies to close contact between the people
who speak the language, but to nothing else; philology has absolutely
nothing to do with ethnology, except so far as it suggests the
existence or the absence of such contact. The contrary assumption,
that language is a test of race, has introduced the utmost confusion
into ethnological speculation, and has nowhere worked greater
scientific and practical mischief than in the ethnology of the British
Islands.

What is known, for certain, about the languages spoken in these
islands and their affinities may, I believe, be summed up as
follows:--

I. _At the time of the Roman conquest, one language, the Celtic, under
two principal dialectical divisions, the Cymric and the Gaelic, was
spoken throughout the British Islands. Cymric was spoken in Britain,
Gaelic in Ireland._

If a language allied to Basque had in earlier times been spoken in
the British Islands, there is no evidence that any Euskarian-speaking
people remained at the time of the Roman conquest. The dark and the
fair population of Britain alike spoke Celtic tongues, and therefore
the name "Celt" is as applicable to the one as to the other.

What was spoken in Ireland can only be surmised by reasoning from the
knowledge of later times; but there seems to be no doubt that it was
Gaelic; and that the Gaelic dialect was introduced into the Western
Highlands by Irish invaders.

II. _The Belgae and the Celtae, with the offshoots of the latter in
Asia Minor, spoke dialects of the Cymric division of Celtic_.

The evidence of this proposition lies in the statement of St. Jerome
before cited; in the similarity of the names of places in Belgic Gaul
and in Britain; and in the direct comparison of sundry ancient Gaulish
and Belgic words which have been preserved, with the existing Cymric
dialects, for which I must refer to the learned work of Brandes.

Formerly, as at the present day, the Cymric dialects of Celtic were
spoken by both the fair and the dark stocks.

III. _There is no record of Gaelic being spoken anywhere save in
Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man_.

This appears to be the final result of the long discussions which have
taken place on this much-debated question. As is the case with the
Cymric dialects, Gaelic is now spoken by both dark and fair stocks.

IV. _When the Teutonic languages first became known, they were spoken
only Xanthochroi, that is to say, by the Germans, the Scandinavians,
and Goths. And they were imported by Xanthochroi into Gaul and into
Britain._

In Gaul the imported Teutonic dialect has been completely overpowered
by the more or less modified Latin, which it found already in
possession; and what Teutonic blood there may be in modern Frenchmen
is not adequately represented in their language. In Britain, on the
contrary, the Teutonic dialects have overpowered the pre-existing
forms of speech, and the people are vastly less "Teutonic" than
their language. Whatever may have been the extent to which the
Celtic-speaking population of the eastern half of Britain was trodden
out and supplanted by the Teutonic-speaking Saxons and Danes, it is
quite certain that no considerable displacement of the Celtic-speaking
people occurred in Cornwall, Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland; and
that nothing approaching to the extinction of that people took place
in Devonshire, Somerset, or the western moiety of Britain generally.
Nevertheless, the fundamentally Teutonic English language is now
spoken throughout Britain, except by an insignificant fraction of the
population in Wales and the Western Highlands. But it is obvious
that this fact affords not the slightest justification for the common
practice of speaking of the present inhabitants of Britain as an
"Anglo-Saxon" people. It is, in fact, just as absurd as the habit of
talking of the French people as a "Latin" race, because they speak a
language which is, in the main, derived from Latin. And the absurdity
becomes the more patent when those who have no hesitation in calling
a Devonshire man, or a Cornish man, an "Anglo-Saxon," would think it
ridiculous to call a Tipperary man by the same title, though he and
his forefathers may have spoken English for as long a time as the
Cornish man.

Ireland, at the earliest period of which we have any knowledge,
contained like Britain, a dark and a fair stock, which, there is every
reason to believe, were identical with the dark and the fair stocks
of Britain. When the Irish first became known they spoke a Gaelic
dialect, and though, for many centuries, Scandinavians made continual
incursions upon, and settlements among them, the Teutonic languages
made no more way among the Irish than they did among the French. How
much Scandinavian blood was introduced there is no evidence to show.
But after the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., the English people,
consisting in part of the descendants of Cymric speakers, and in part
of the descendants of Teutonic speakers, made good their footing in
the eastern half of the island, as the Saxons and Danes made good
theirs in England; and did their best to complete the parallel by
attempting the extirpation of the Gaelic-speaking Irish. And they
succeeded to a considerable extent; a large part of Eastern Ireland is
now peopled by men who are substantially English by descent, and the
English language has spread over the land far beyond the limits of
English blood.

Ethnologically, the Irish people were originally, like the people of
Britain, a mixture of Melanochroi and Xanthochroi. They resembled the
Britons in speaking a Celtic tongue; but it was a Gaelic and not a
Cymric form of the Celtic language. Ireland was untouched by the Roman
conquest, nor do the Saxons seem to have had any influence upon
her destinies, but the Danes and Norsemen poured in a contingent of
Teutonism, which has been largely supplemented by English and Scotch
efforts.

What, then, is the value of the ethnological difference between the
Englishman of the western half of England and the Irishman of the
eastern half of Ireland? For what reason does the one deserve the
name of a "Celt," and not the other? And further, if we turn to
the inhabitants of the western half of Ireland, why should the term
"Celts" be applied to them more than to the inhabitants of Cornwall?
And if the name is applicable to the one as justly as to the other,
why should not intelligence, perseverance, thrift, industry, sobriety,
respect for law, be admitted to be Celtic virtues? And why should we
not seek for the cause of their absence in something else than the
idle pretext of "Celtic blood?"

I have been unable to meet with any answers to these questions.

V. _The Celtic and the Teutonic dialects are members of the same
great Aryan family of languages; but there is evidence to show that a
non-Aryan language was at one time spoken over a large extent of the
area occupied by Melanochroi in Europe_.

The non-Aryan language here referred to is the Euskarian, now spoken
only by the Basques, but which seems in earlier times to have been
the language of the Aquitanians and Spaniards, and may possibly have
extended much further to the East. Whether it has any connection with
the Ligurian and Oscan dialects are questions upon which, of course,
I do not presume to offer any opinion. But it is important to remark
that it is a language the area of which has gradually diminished
without any corresponding extirpation of the people who primitively
spoke it; so that the people of Spain and of Aquitaine at the present
day must be largely "Euskarian" by descent in just the same sense as
the Cornish men are "Celtic" by descent.

Such seem to me to be the main facts respecting the ethnology of the
British islands and of Western Europe, which may be said to be fairly
established. The hypothesis by which I think (with De Belloguet and
Thurnam) the facts may best be explained is this: In very remote times
Western Europe and the British islands were inhabited by the dark
stock, or the Melanochroi, alone, and these Melanochroi spoke dialects
allied to the Euskarian. The Xanthochroi, spreading over the great
Eurasiatic plains westward, and speaking Aryan dialects, gradually
invaded the territories of the Melanochroi. The Xanthochroi, who
thus came into contact with the Western Melanochroi, spoke a Celtic
language; and that Celtic language, whether Cymric or Gaelic, spread
over the Melanochroi far beyond the limits of intermixture of blood,
supplanting Euskarian, just as English and French, have supplanted
Celtic. Even as early as Caesar's time, I suppose that the Euskarian
was everywhere, except in Spain and in Aquitaine, replaced by Celtic,
and thus the Celtic speakers were no longer of one ethnological stock,
but of two. Both in Western Europe and in England a third wave of
language--in the one case Latin, in the other Teutonic--has spread
over the same area. In Western Europe, it has left a fragment of the
primary Euskarian in one corner of the country, and a fragment of the
secondary Celtic in another. In the British islands, only outlying
pools of the secondary linguistic wave remain in Wales, the Highlands,
Ireland, and the Isle of Man. If this hypothesis is a sound one, it
follows that the name of Celtic is not properly applicable to the
Melanochroic or dark stock of Europe. They are merely, so to speak,
secondary Celts. The primary and aboriginal Celtic-speaking people are
Xanthochroi--the typical Gauls of the ancient writers, and the close
allies by blood, customs, and language, of the Germans.

IX.

PALAEONTOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION.

(THE ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS TO THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY, FOR 1870.)

It is now eight years since, in the absence of the late Mr. Leonard
Homer, who then presided over us, it fell to my lot, as one of the
Secretaries of this Society, to draw up the customary Annual Address.
I availed myself of the opportunity to endeavour to "take stock"
of that portion of the science of biology which is commonly called
"palaeontology," as it then existed; and, discussing one after another
the doctrines held by palaeontologists, I put before you the results
of my attempts to sift the well-established from the hypothetical or
the doubtful. Permit me briefly to recall to your minds what those
results were:--

1. The living population of all parts of the earth's surface which
have yet been examined has undergone a succession of changes which,
upon the whole, have been of a slow and gradual character.

2. When the fossil remains which are the evidences of these successive
changes, as they have occurred in any two more or less distant parts
of the surface of the earth, are compared, they exhibit a certain
broad and general parallelism. In other words, certain forms of life
in one locality occur in the same general order of succession as, or
are _homotaxial_ with, similar forms in the other locality.

3. Homotaxis is not to be held identical with synchronism without
independent evidence. It is possible that similar, or even identical,
faunae and florae in two different localities may be of extremely
different ages, if the term "age" is used in its proper chronological
sense. I stated that "geographical provinces, or zones, may have been
as distinctly marked in the Palaeozoic epoch as at present; and those
seemingly sudden appearances of new genera and species, which we
ascribe to new creation, may be simple results of migration."

4. The opinion that the oldest known fossils are the earliest forms of
life has no solid foundation.

5. If we confine ourselves to positively ascertained facts, the total
amount of change in the forms of animal and vegetable life, since the
existence of such forms is recorded, is small. When compared with the
lapse of time since the first appearance of these forms, the amount
of change is wonderfully small. Moreover, in each great group of the
animal and vegetable kingdoms, there are certain forms which I termed
PERSISTENT TYPES, which have remained, with but very little apparent
change, from their first appearance to the present time.

6. In answer to the question "What, then, does an impartial survey of
the positively ascertained truths of palaeontology testify in relation
to the common doctrines of progressive modification, which suppose
that modification to have taken place by a necessary progress from
more to less embryonic forms, from more to less generalized types,
within, the limits of the period represented by the fossiliferous
rocks?" I reply, "It negatives these doctrines; for it either shows us
no evidence of such modification, or demonstrates such modification as
has occurred to have been very slight; and, as to the nature of
that modification, it yields no evidence whatsoever that the earlier
members of any long-continued group were more generalized in structure
than the later ones."

I think that I cannot employ my last opportunity of addressing you,
officially, more properly--I may say more dutifully--than in
revising these old judgments with such help as further knowledge and
reflection, and an extreme desire to get at the truth, may afford me.

1. With respect to the first proposition, I may remark that
whatever may be the case among the physical geologists, catastrophic
palaeontologists are practically extinct. It is now no part of
recognized geological doctrine that the species of one formation all
died out and were replaced by a brand-new set in the next formation.
On the contrary, it is generally, if not universally, agreed that
the succession of life has been, the result of a slow and gradual
replacement of species by species; and that all appearances of
abruptness of change are due to breaks in the series of deposits, or
other changes in physical conditions. The continuity of living forms
has been unbroken from the earliest times to the present day.

2, 3. The use of the word "homotaxis" instead of "synchronism" has
not, so far as I know, found much favour in the eyes of geologists.
I hope, therefore, that it is a love for scientific caution, and not
mere personal affection for a bantling of my own, which leads me still
to think that the change of phrase is of importance, and that the
sooner it is made, the sooner shall we get rid of a number of pitfalls
which beset the reasoner upon the facts and theories of geology.

One of the latest pieces of foreign intelligence which has reached
us is the information that the Austrian geologists have, at last,
succumbed to the weighty evidence which M. Barrande has accumulated,
and have admitted the doctrine of colonies. But the admission of the
doctrine of colonies implies the further admission that even identity
of organic remains is no proof of the synchronism of the deposits
which contain them.

4. The discussions touching the _Eozoon_, which commenced in 1864,
have abundantly justified the fourth proposition. In 1862, the oldest
record of life was in the Cambrian rocks; but if the _Eozoon_ be,
as Principal Dawson and Dr. Carpenter have shown so much reason for
believing, the remains of a living being, the discovery of its true
nature carried life back to a period which, as Sir William Logan has
observed, is as remote from that during which the Cambrian rocks were
deposited, as the Cambrian epoch itself is from the tertiaries. In
other words, the ascertained duration of life upon the globe was
nearly doubled at a stroke.

5. The significance of persistent types, and of the small amount of
change which has taken place even in those forms which can be shown to
have been modified, becomes greater and greater in my eyes, the longer
I occupy myself with the biology of the past.

Consider how long a time has elapsed since the Miocene epoch. Yet, at
that time, there is reason to believe that every important group in
every order of the _Mammalia_ was represented. Even the comparatively
scanty Eocene fauna yields examples of the orders _Cheiroptera,
Insectivora, Rodentia_, and _Perissodactyla_; of _Artiodactyla_
under both the Ruminant and the Porcine modifications; of _Carnivora,
Cetacea_, and _Marsupialia_.

Or, if we go back to the older half of the Mesozoic epoch, how truly
surprising it is to find every order of the _Reptilia_, except
the _Ophidia_, represented; while some groups, such as the
_Ornithoscelida_ and the _Pterosauria_, more specialized than any
which now exist, abounded.

There is one division of the _Amphibia_ which offers especially
important evidence upon this point, inasmuch as it bridges over the
gap between the Mesozoic and the Palaeozoic formations (often supposed
to be of such prodigious magnitude), extending, as it does, from the
bottom of the Carboniferous series to the top of the Trias, if not
into the Lias. I refer to the Labyrinthodonts. As the address of 1862
was passing through the press, I was able to mention, in a note, the
discovery of a large Labyrinthodont, with well-ossified vertebrae, in
the Edinburgh coal-field. Since that time eight or ten distinct genera
of Labyrinthodonts have been discovered in the Carboniferous rocks
of England, Scotland, and Ireland, not to mention the American forms
described by Principal Dawson and Professor Cope. So that, at the
present time, the Labyrinthodont Fauna of the Carboniferous rocks is
more extensive and diversified than that of the Trias, while its chief
types, so far as osteology enables us to judge, are quite as highly
organized. Thus it is certain that a comparatively highly organized
vertebrate type, such as that of the Labyrinthodonts, is capable
of persisting, with no considerable change, through the period
represented by the vast deposits which constitute the Carboniferous,
the Permian, and the Triassic formations.

The very remarkable results which have been brought to light by the
sounding and dredging operations, which have been carried on with
such remarkable success by the expeditions sent out by our own, the
American, and the Swedish Governments, under the supervision of
able naturalists, have a bearing in the same direction. These
investigations have demonstrated the existence, at great depths in the
ocean, of living animals in some cases identical with, in others very
similar to, those which are found fossilized in the white chalk. The
_Globigerinae_, Cyatholiths, Coccospheres, Discoliths in the one are
absolutely identical with those in the other; there are identical, or
closely analogous, species of Sponges, Echinoderms, and Brachiopods.
Off the coast of Portugal, there now lives a species of _Beryx_,
which, doubtless, leaves its bones and scales here and there in the
Atlantic ooze, as its predecessor left its spoils in the mud of the
sea of the Cretaceous epoch.

Many years ago[1] I ventured to speak of the Atlantic mud as "modern
chalk," and I know of no fact inconsistent with the view which
Professor Wyville Thomson has advocated, that the modern chalk is not
only the lineal descendant of the ancient chalk, but that it remains,
so to speak, in the possession of the ancestral estate; and that from
the Cretaceous period (if not much earlier) to the present day, the
deep sea has covered a large part of what is now the area of the
Atlantic. But if _Globigerinae_, and _Terebratula caput-serpentis_
and _Beryx_, not to mention other forms of animals and of plants, thus
bridge over the interval between the present and the Mesozoic periods,
is it possible that the majority of other living things underwent a
"sea-change into something new and strange" all at once?

[Footnote 1: See an article in the _Saturday Review_, for 1858, on
"Chalk, Ancient and Modern."]

6. Thus far I have endeavoured to expand and to enforce by fresh
arguments, but not to modify in any important respect, the ideas
submitted to you on a former occasion. But when I come to the
propositions touching progressive modification, it appears to me, with
the help of the new light which has broken from various quarters, that
there is much ground for softening the somewhat Brutus-like severity
with which, in 1862, I dealt with a doctrine, for the truth of which I
should have been glad enough to be able to find a good foundation.
So far, indeed, as the _Invertebrata_, and the lower _Vertebrata_ are
concerned, the facts and the conclusions which are to be drawn from
them appear to me to remain what they were. For anything that, as yet,
appears to the contrary, the earliest known Marsupials may have been
as highly organized as their living congeners; the Permian lizards
show no signs of inferiority to those of the present day; the
Labyrinthodonts cannot be placed below the living Salamander and
Triton; the Devonian Ganoids are closely related to _Polypterus_ and
to _Lepidosiren_.

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