The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo. TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 1900. "JAPHET IN SEARCH OF A FATHER."

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 55, 6 March 1900, Page 4

The Evening Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and Echo.

TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 1900.

"JAPHET IN SEARCH OF A FATHER."

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future In the distance, And the ccod that we can do.

The British nation is not unlike Captain Marryat's hero wandering about the world in search of a father. Indeed all the nations of the earth seem, ho far as the modern science of ethnology goes, as lost to their ancestors as the lost tribes of Israel. We positively decline to start any controversy by the mention of these errant tribes with those who passionately believe that they have been found with all their blessings in the British notion and her English speaking- offshoots. We have no objection to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as our fathers in the flesh, as well as in our Messianic faith, if only a faint trace of the Semitic features of the Israelite with or without guile could be seen in our faces: and if authorities in prophetic Hebrew literature—like the late Professor Robertson Smith and his disciple Professor George Adam Smith—would permit us. . tt is comforting' to some . seekers after truth to find a number of people in this world without the shadow of a doubt upon the most perplexing questions. The late Astronomer Royal of Scotland was one of these in regard to the problems of the great pyramid. His grand life dream I and marvellous discovery dominated all knowledge. Piazzi Smith and his great-pyi-amid is a memory, however sad, of the possibility of certainty and stability in a life of doubt and change. He. has gone to higher light to read with clearer eyes the meaning of the greater pyramid of. life mystery, the problems of the birth and death of men and nutions.

Then we entirely leave out of sight at present questions of evolution—of the descent or ascent of man. The frightful-looking bare-faced Borneo ape in the Auckland Museum might be an aid to soiue^ Aucklanders anxious to find relatives oi a lower order. The nose especially might be a -profitable- study to the confirmed toper.-We-.simply desire "to express keen regret, with

Professor R. S. Conway in a recent

paper on "The Riddle of 'the Nations," that we seem, according to the modern light of ethnology to have lost our prehistoric human ancestors. Huxley's threefold division of the human race into Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian, brings together some strange bedfellows. It is not quite, synonomous with the practical division of European, Asian, African, and the British people find it difficult to recognise themselves as Caucasians, descended perhaps from some Black Sea. Cossack. A few Tartars may be caught in our British homes, but that is not proof positive that we are all Russians from the snows and stopes of Mount Caucasus. We much prefer the threefold division of the Hebrew record to Huxley's. Perhaps, iii reading- the riddle of the nations ethnologists may in some way or other return to it, and be satisfied with our position as the descendants of the sons of the patriarchs who escaped the deluge—Ham, Shem, and Japheth.' It would be simplicity itself to think of the kindly spirit of ancient Japheth seeking his offspring ill the British nation, compared to the British nation sent adrift again as Japhet in search of si father.

Huxley, so recently gone from us, is already but of date.' Professor Conwny, we hope unintentionally associates him with strange company. Speaking of. the many biologists and ethnologists misled by uncertain eraniological data, he says: "Rarely, it would seem, in all the history of science has such a troop of eminent persons rushed violently down the wrong turning1, us the learned and brilliant writers who have taken for their text the measurement of the human skull. New Testament readers recognise in the metaphor of this

sentence Huxley's "Gaderen pigs;" so that in a curious manner the great biologist is hoist here by his own somewhat profane petard.

If not on the slopes of Mount Caucasus, where shall we find the home of our prehistoric British fathers? "On the slopes of the Hindoo-Koosh?" This more venerable superstition, upheld by scholars who esteemed Sanskrit as "the elder sister of the chief

languages .of Europe1' is now supposed to be. dead, if not already buried. Indeed we could never fall

hi love with the spirit of. our foi'efather a;? an Asiatic ghost robed in white and chattering Sanskrit. Canon Taylor's conception of him, after careful antiquarian research, as wearing- "the garb of old Gaul," however limited in quantity, was more satisfactory. It meets at least the native pi-ide of the Celt in nis ancient blood and .language. Our prehistoric fathers, according' to Taylor, were "tall, broad-headed, fair folks, with red hair and freckles, pure ■Celts, average height sft Bin. Some might see a stronger resemblance in "the long-headed Teutons," with fair face and flaxen hair, two inches higher than the Celt. Taylor's other two divisions of ancient European humanity we are, of course, quite superior to. "The short feeble folks with dark skin"—the silurian. ancestors of degenerate Spain —cannot aspire to equality with us; and the Ligurian forefathers of the French

and Finns and Lapps "short dai'k folk, whose average height is 3ft Sin," are quite beneath us. The Celts by their superior style of life and language take the chief place in Europe, like their British descendants at the present hour. The Celtic theory is evidently upheld by the sketches of prehistoric British life that appeared in "Punch" last year. If we remember aright the members of the Government and leaders of the Opposition appeared in very limited kilts. Caricature surely never took greater

liberties .in picturing serious men; except perhups in prehistoric Scotland "De-pict-ed" by the same artist in "Punch's" Almanack for the present year. The ancestors of Scotchmen look Celtic enough, with rent philabegs ■ and tattered plaids, stirring the porridge pot, fishing the salmon, dancing the Highland fling to the skirl of the bagpipes, delighting in snuff and mountain dew in very stimulative and sedative quantities. All this, combined with the royal thistle and royal game of golf, and decidedly prehistoric long-necked deer and short-necked bull and long Ifaced preacher, is evidence enough to. show that the artist of prehistoric times in the British isles is a disciple of Taylor and the Celtic school.

But. alas, neither the comic pencil of the artist, nor serious pen of the

antiquarian can .give permanence to the. Celtic theory. Like the Asiatic and Caucasian it has had its day. It must now, though1 Professor Con-way feels it cruel to say so, cease to be. The .craniojogical and linguistic data upon which it rests have given way. "The human cranium, it seems, will not bear, the weight of any ethnological deductions." Virchow, as well as Conway, says so. It is simply crushing to the Celtic pride to learn that the skull of the highly intellectual Highlander, Professor MacAlister, of Cambridge, was found, according to methods of measurement, to be of the lowest European type. There is no fixity of shape even between parent and child, and no fixity of type between natives in past ages.

The skulls of broad-heads and longheads are found together in Celtic cairns. We have'no space to indicate the kind of linguistic data accepted to uphold the'Celtie theory."' Cdnway says: "The, whole fabric of Linguistic

Palaeontology as " it. was conceived when Canon Taylor wrote has fallen in hopeless ,ruin. His four ■ chosen races were competing for a distinc-. tiou as imaginary as they were themselves." Yet ■ Canon Taylor wrote only ten years Qg'o. "Sic transit gloria" of the science of ethnology as well as of the whole world of the nations. We might expect at least, from a consciousness of failure to read the riddle of the nations, a somewhat humbler tone in some modern scientists in dealing with the light of ancient times. In that light the British, and all nations, find a Father on earth and in heaven.