But there are other forces now drawing into the field to support the
long-neglected claims of tradition. Etymology, which professed to settle
doubts by an appeal to the elementary sounds of words, was banished from
the politer and more influential circles of English learning by a decree
as arbitrary as that pronounced on the poems of Ossian. It has come back
with a new commission and under a new title;--Ethnography is the name
given by our continental neighbours to this new science, which, in its
future developments, may bring to light some of the most obscure and
important circumstances affecting the human race, from its origin
through every succeeding epoch of its existence. The distinguishing
object of this inquiry is to identify the fortunes, migrations, and
changes of the human family as to situation, policy, religion,
agriculture, and arts, by comparing the terms supplied by or introduced
into the language of any one country with the names of the same objects
in every other. There would be no such thing as chance in nature could
we know the laws which determine every separate accident. In like manner
there will scarcely be any doubt respecting the primitive history of man
when this new science shall have accumulated and revealed all the
treasures which it may be enabled to appropriate.
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