The Abbé Hervas in the 17th century, published his Catalogue of Tongues, and Arithmetic of Nations, parts of a large and remarkable work, the _Saggio del Universo_. His _data_ he collected by means of an almost unlimited correspondence with the Jesuit missionaries of the Propaganda.
The all-embracing mind of Leibnitz had not only applied itself to philology, but had clearly seen its bearing upon history. A paper on the Basque language is a sample of the ethnology of the inventor of Fluxions.
Reland wrote on the wide distribution of the Malay tongue; criticised certain vocabularies from the South-Sea Islands of Hoorn, Egmont, Ticopia (then called Cocos Island), and Solomon’s Archipelago, and gave publicity to a fact which even now is mysterious--the existence of Malay words in the language of Madagascar.
In 1801 Adelung’s _Mithridates_ appeared, containing specimens of all the known languages of the world; a work as classical to the comparative philologist as Blackstone’s Commentaries are to the English lawyer. Vater’s Supplement (1821) is a supplement to Adelung; Jülg’s (1845) to Vater’s.
Klaproth’s is the other great classic in this department. His _Asia Polyglotta_ and _Sprachatlas_ give us the classification of all the families of Asia, according to the _vocabularies_ representing their languages. Whether a comparison between their different _grammars_ would do the same is doubtful; since it by no means follows that the evidence of the two coincides.
Klaproth and Adelung have the same prominence in _philological_ that Buffon and Blumenbach have in _zoological_ ethnology.
Blumenbach _appreciated_ the philological method: but the first who _combined_ the two was Dr. Prichard. His profession gave him the necessary physiology; and that he was a philologist amongst philologists is shown not only by numerous details scattered throughout his writings, but by his ‘Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations’--the most definite and desiderated addition that has been made to ethnographical philology. I say nothing about the details of Dr. Prichard’s great work. Let those who doubt its value try to do without it.
But there is still something wanting. The relation of the sciences to the other branches of knowledge requires fixing. With anthropology the case is pretty clear. It comes into partial contact with the naturalist sciences (or those based on the principle of classification) and the biological (or those based on the idea of organization and life).