Ɛpsilon

From Hyde Clarke   5 January 1878

32 St. George’s Square | S.W.

5 Jany 1878

My dear Sir,

There is fortunately no “if” in the case.1

It is fortunately easy for you or any one to test most of the main facts.

There is a book published by the Church Missionary Society called the Polyglotta Africana by the Revd Mr Kœlle, which received the Volney Prize.2

This is an Atlas of words in 200 African languages.

If you take the similar books for the Indian languages by Dr W W Hunter, Sir George Campbell or Genl Dalton, you can compare from the left hand column of Hunter from the groups of Garo &c, Naga, & Kolarian with the African & you will get most of your words, even if an unskilled observer sets himself to the task.3

As another test take the Hidatsa or any of the grammars published by Dr Hayden & the US Geological Survey, & you may follow Hidatsa almost word for word in the Polyglotta, & very closely in Hunter, & then this will bring you into the Subhimalayan languages.4

This is a simple scientific & natural history test, & I trust it will be acceptable to you.

Your’s faithfully | Hyde Clarke

Charles Darwin Esq DLL5 FRS

1
Clarke had written to CD that he had established ‘the unity of language in its development’, and CD had replied that if he had, he would have effected a ‘most valuable piece of work’ (Correspondence vol. 25, letter from Hyde Clarke, 27 December 1877, and letter to Hyde Clarke, [29 December 1877]).
2
The prix Volney is awarded by the Institut de France for a work in comparative philology; Sigismund Wilhelm Kölle won it for his Polyglotta Africana (Koelle 1854), which compared about 160 African languages.
3
William Wilson Hunter was the author of A comparative dictionary of the languages of India and High Asia (Hunter 1868). George Campbell edited Specimens of the languages of India, including those of the aboriginal tribes of Bengal, the Central Provinces, and the eastern frontier (Campbell ed. 1874). Edward Tuite Dalton’s Descriptive ethnology of Bengal (Dalton 1872) included vocabularies. In H. Clarke 1875, pp. 9 and 11, Clarke identified the Garo language of India as an early ‘class’, with affinities to some African languages, and the Kolarian group in India as representative of a prehistoric group of languages. The Naga peoples live in north-eastern India; the Garo language is also spoken in parts of north-eastern India. Kolarian was a term coined by Campbell (Campbell ed. 1874, p. 3) for some tribes of the Central Provinces and Western Bengal who spoke a language distinct from that of other peoples in those areas.
4
Washington Matthews’s Ethnography and philology of the Hidatsa Indians (Matthews 1877) was published under the auspices of the US Geological and Geographical Survey; Ferdinand Vanderveer Hayden was the geologist-in-charge.
5
DLL: i.e. LLD, doctor of laws. CD was awarded an honorary LLD by Cambridge University in 1877 (see Correspondence vol. 25, Appendix II).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-11312,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-11312