Psammetichus, to be sure, according to Herodotus, did as follows. He took children of a poor man, put them in the charge of a shepherd who was forbidden to speak in their presence, suckled them in a lone hut through a she-goat, waited for the age at which boys begin to talk, and then took down the first word they uttered. This was _bekos_, which when it was shown to mean in the Phrygian language _bread_, the Egyptians yielded the palm of antiquity to that rival.
Now this was an ethnological experiment; but then Psammetichus _was_ an oriental despot; and the instance itself is, probably, the only one of its class--the only one, or nearly so--the only one which is a true experiment; since in order to be such there must be a definite and specific end or object in view.
We know the tradition about Newton and the apple. This, if true, was no experiment, but an observation. To have been the former, the tree should have been shaken for the purpose of seeing the fruit descend. There would then have been an end and aim--malice prepense, so to say.
Hence the phænomena of the African slave-trade, of English emigration, and of other similar elements for observation are no experiments; since it has not been Science that either the slaver or the settler ever thought about. Sugar or cotton, land or money, was what ran in their heads.
The revolting operation by which the jealous Oriental labours to secure the integrity of his harem is in its end a scientific fact. It tells how much the whole system sympathises with the mutilation of one of its parts. But it is nothing for Science to either applaud or imitate. It is repeated by the sensual Italian for the sake of ensuring fine voices in the music-market; and Science is disgusted at its repetition. Even if done in her own name, and for her own objects, it would still be but an inhuman and intolerable form of zootomy.
Still the trade in Africans, and the emigration of Englishmen are said to partake of the nature of a scientific experiment, even without being one. They are said to serve as such. So they do; yet not in the way in which they are often interpreted. A European regiment is decimated by being placed on the Gambia, or in Sierra Leone. The American Anglo-Saxon is said to have lost the freshness of the European--to have become brown in colour, and wiry in muscle. Perhaps he has. Yet what does this prove? Merely the effect of _sudden_ changes; the results of _distant_ transplantation; the imperfect character of those forms of acclimatization which are not _gradual_. It was not in this way that the world was originally peopled. New climates were approached by degrees, step by step, by enlargement and extension of the circumference of a previously acclimated family. Hence the experience of the kind in question, valuable as it is in the way of Medical Police, is comparatively worthless in a theory as to the Migrations of Mankind. Take a man from Caucasus to the Gold Coast, and he either dies or takes a fever. But would he do so if his previous sojourn had been on the Gambia, his grandfather’s on the Senegal, his ancestor’s in the tenth degree on the Nile, and that ancestor’s ancestor’s on the Jordan--thus going back till we reached the first remote patriarch of the migration on the Phasis? This is an experiment which no single generation can either make or observe; yet less than this is no experiment at all, no imitation of that particular operation of Nature which we are so curious to investigate.