e mother-tongue of this mixed race is Spanish, with an
infusion of Mexican words; and a large proportion cannot speak any
native dialect. In most or all nations of mankind, crossing or
intermarriage of races has thus taken place between the conquering
invader and the conquered native, so that the language spoken by the
nation may represent the results of conquest as much or more than of
ancestry. The supersession of the Celtic Cornish by English, and of the
Slavonic Old-Prussian by German, are but examples of a process which has
for untold ages been supplanting native dialects, whose very names have
mostly disappeared. On the other hand, the language of the warlike
invader or peaceful immigrant may yield, in a few generations, to the
tongue of the mass of the population, as the Northman's was replaced by
French, and modern German gives way to English in the United States.
Judging, then, by the extirpation and adoption of languages within the
range of history, it is obvious that to classify mankind into, races,
Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Polynesian, Kaffir, &c., on the mere evidence
of language, is intrinsically unsound.

VI. _Development of Civilization._--The conditions of man at the lowest
and highest known levels of culture are separated by a vast interval;
but this interval is so nearly filled by known intermediate stages, that
the line of continuity between the lowest savagery and the highest
civilization is unbroken at any critical point.

An examination of the details of savage life shows not only that there
is an immeasurable difference between the rudest man and the highest
lower animal, but also that the least cultured savages have themselves
advanced far beyond the lowest intellectual and moral state at which
human tribes can be conceived as capable of existing, when placed under
favourable circumstances of warm climate, abundant food, and security
from too severe destructive influences. The Australian black-fellow or
the forest Indian of Brazil, who may be taken as examples of the lowest
modern savage, had, before contact with whites, attained to rudimentary
stages in many of the characteristic functions of civilized life. His
language, expressing thoughts by conventional articulate sounds, is the
same in essential principle as the most cultivated philosophic dialect,
only less exact and copious. His weapons, tools and other appliances
such as the hammer, hatchet, spear, knife, awl, thread, net, canoe, &c.,