Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/419

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SKETCH OF HORATIO HALE.
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pology in Paris, reviewed the address of 1886 at length in the periodical L'Homme for September of that year, and, while dissenting from some of its physiological suggestions recommended the philological conclusion very strongly to the attention of scholars. Prof. Sayce, in his presidential address of 1887 to the Section of Anthropology in the British Association, spoke in equally commendatory terms, merely asking for some additional evidence, which the author of the theory endeavored to supply in his Canadian Institute paper already referred to. Prof. G. J. Romanes, in his Mental Evolution of Man, quotes largely from Mr. Hale's address to the extent of nearly a fourth part of the whole essay accepting the author's conclusions and fortifying them by other evidence. Prof. Henry Drummond, in his recent work, The Ascent of Man, takes a similar view. Lastly, Dr. Brinton, in his important work on Races and Peoples (which he dedicates to Mr. Hale), has given his opinion on the subject in clear and decided terms. "Those convolutions of the brain" (he writes) "which preside over speech being once developed, man did not have to repeat his long and toilsome task of acquiring linguistic faculty. Children are always originating new words and expressions, and if two or three infants are left together, they will soon have a tongue of their own, unlike anything they hear around them. Numerous examples of this character have been collected by Mr. Hale, and upon them he has based an entirely satisfactory theory of the source of that multiplicity of language which we find in various parts of the globe."

In 1889 Mr. Hale was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. To their translations he contributed, in 1891, a paper entitled Language as a Test of Mental Capacity. This essay was also separately reprinted, with the additional title of An Attempt to demonstrate the Tone Basis of Anthropology, and attracted hardly less attention from ethnologists than his address of 1886. It received from the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland the unusual compliment of being republished in full in their quarterly journal—despite its length of thirty-six quarto pages. It was also reprinted in four sections in successive numbers of The American Antiquarian for the following year, under the title of Man and Language. A review of this paper in Nature (June 30, 1892)—anonymous, but bearing clear evidence of the style of Prof. Max Müller—speaks of Mr. Hale as "the Nestor of American philologists, and, at the same time, the Ulysses of comparative philology in that country," and of his paper as "an important essay." The eminent reviewer adds: "All his contributions to American ethnology and philology have been distinguished by their originality, accuracy, and trustworthiness. Every one of them makes a substantial addition to our knowl-