XL] THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 439 



for the final possession of man, are not to be confounded with 

 the Tacanas (Arao/ias] a widely ramifying nation about the Beni 

 and Madre de Dios, head streams of the Madeira 1 . Some atten- 

 tion has been paid to their sonorous speech, which appears to be 

 a stock language with strong Pano and weak Aymara 2 affinities. 

 Although its numeral system stops at 2, it is still in advance of a 

 neighbouring C/iiquito tongue, which is said to have no numerals 

 at all, etama, supposed to be i, really meaning "alone." 



Yet it would be a mistake to infer that these Bolivian Chiqui- 

 tos, who occupy the southernmost headstreams of 

 the Madeira, are a particularly stupid people. On qu e s ch 

 the contrary, the Naquinoneis, "Men," as they call 

 themselves, are in some respects remarkably clever, and, strange 

 to say, their otherwise rich and harmonious language (presumably 

 the dominant Moncoca dialect is meant) has terms to express such 

 various distinctions as the height of a tree, of a house, or a tower, 

 and other subtle shades of difference disregarded in more cultured 

 tongues 3 . But it is to be considered that, pace Prof. Max Miiller, 

 the range of thought and of speech is not the same, and all peoples 

 have no doubt many notions for which they have no equivalents 

 in their necessarily defective languages. The Chiquitos, i.e. "Little 

 Folks," were so named because, "when the country was first 

 invaded, the Indians fled to the forests; and the Spaniards came 

 to their abandoned huts, where the doorways were so exceedingly 



1 D'Orbigny, in. p. 364 sq. 



1 Such "identities" as Tac. drefa = A.ym.. chacha (man); etai=utax (house) 

 etc., are not convincing, especially in the absence of any scientific study of the 

 laws of Laiitverschiebung, if any exist between the Aymara-Tacana phonetic 

 systems. And then the question of loan words has to be settled before any safe 

 conclusions can be drawn from such assumed resemblances. The point is 

 important in the present connection, because current statements regarding the 

 supposed reduction of the number of stock languages in South America are 

 largely based on the unscientific comparison of lists of words, which may have 

 nothing in common except perhaps a letter or two like the ;;/ in Macedon and 

 Monmouth. Two languages (cf. Turkish and Arabic) may have hundreds or 

 thousands of words in common, and yet belong to fundamentally different 

 linguistic families. 



3 A. Balbi, Atlas Ethnographiqut dit Globe, XXVII. With regard to the 

 numerals this authority tells us that "il a emprunte a 1'espagnol ses noms de 

 nombres" (ib.}. 



