366 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



the force of the linguistic argument by the assumption, at one 

 time much in favour, that the American tongues are of a some- 

 what evanescent nature, in an unstable condition, often changing 

 their form and structure within a few generations. But, says Prof. 

 Powell, " this widely spread opinion does not find warrant in 

 the facts discovered in the course of this research. The author 

 has everywhere been impressed with the fact that savage tongues 

 are singularly persistent, and that a language which is dependent 

 for its existence upon oral tradition is not easily modified 1 ." A 

 test case is the Delaware (Leni Lenape), an Algonquian tongue 

 which, judging from the specimens collected by the Rev. Th. 

 Campanius about 1645, has undergone but slight modification 

 during the last 250 years. 



In this connection the important point to be noticed is the fact 

 that some of the stock languages have an immense range, while 

 others are crowded together in indescribable confusion in rugged 

 upland valleys, or about river estuaries, or in the recesses of track- 

 less woodlands, and this strangely irregular distribution prevails 

 in all the main divisions of the continent. Thus of Prof. Powell's 

 58 linguistic families in North America as many as forty are 

 restricted to the relatively narrow strip of coast-land between the 

 Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, ten are dotted round the Gulf 

 of Mexico from Florida to the Rio Grande, and two disposed 

 round the Gulf of California, while nearly all the rest of the land 

 some six million square miles is occupied by the six widely 

 diffused Eskimauan, Athapascan, Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan, 

 and Shoshonean families. The same phenomenon is presented 

 by Central and South America, where less than a dozen stock lan- 

 guages Opatan, Nahuatlan, Huastecan, Chorotegan, Quechuan, 

 Arawakan, Gesan (Tapuyan), Tupi-Guaranian, Cariban, Tacanan 

 -are spread over millions of square miles, while many scores of 

 others are restricted to extremely narrow areas. Here the crowding 

 is largely determined, as in Caucasia, by the altitude (Andes in 

 Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia ; Sierras in Mexico). But 

 in the United States the chief resort of the "feeble folk" have 

 been the fjord-like formations and estuaries with their rich fishing- 



1 Indian Linguistic Families, p. 141. 



