200 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OP 



formly assigned the American family to a separate group or class. Others 

 again, like Zimmerman,* Yirey,f Humboldt, J Garnot.$ and various au- 

 thorities of a still more recent date, associate the aboriginal Americans 

 with the Mongols or other Asiatics. It is an interesting fact that Cuvier || 

 recognized three distinct races of man, into neither of which, however, did he 

 place the Americans, but left them unclassified. 



The statements of the earlier investigators those of the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth centuries concerning the -similarity of physical characters ex- 

 hibited by the different sections of the American race, harmonize remarkably 

 with the results of the laborious and protracted researches of different emi- 

 nent philologists. As early as 1798, Dr. Barton endeavored to show " that in 

 all the vast countries of America, there is but one language.''^ In 1810, the 

 celebrated philologue, Yater, to whom had been committed the completion of 

 Adelung's Mithridates, or Allgemeine Sprachenkunde showed that the general in- 

 ternal or grammatical structure of the American languages was the same for 

 all.** Humboldt, in his Personal Narrative, testified to the same remarkable 

 phenomenon.! f Du Ponceau characterized the peculiar, complicated grammar 

 of the American idioms from Greenland to Cape Horn by the term polysyn- 

 thetic.JJ Still later. Gallatin affirmed that all the languages of the native in- 

 habitants of America from the Arctic Ocean to Gape Horn, have, as far as they 

 have been investigated, a distinct character common to all, and apparently 

 differing from any of those of the other continent with which we are most 

 familiar. \\ 



While these and other observers were thus surveying the American Races 

 from a philological standpoint, the late Dr. Morton was industriously en- 

 gaged in collecting the materials necessary to illustrate their osteology, and 

 at the same time the distinguished French naturalist, M. Alcide D'Orbigny 

 was travelling in South America and studying the natives, not with the un- 

 practised and superficial eye of the curious traveller, but with that of the 

 closely observant and discriminating anatomist. 



The remarkably discrepant ethnological results of the labors of these emi- 

 nent naturalists were given to the world at the same time. The Crania Ame- 

 ricana and LI Homme Americain both appeared in the year 1839. In the former 

 work, Dr. Morton, speaking of the native Americans, declared that "it may 

 be assumed as a fact that no other race of men maintains such a striking 

 analogy through all its subdivisions, and amidst all its variety of physical 

 circumstances."! In a later publication he asserted that " the peculiar phy- 

 siognomy of the Indian is as undeviatingly characteristic as that of the Ne- 

 gro ; for whether we see him in the athletic Charib or the stunted Chayma, in 

 the dark Californian or the fair Borroa. he is an Indian still, and cannot be 

 mistaken for a being of any other race. ,; f \ On the other hand, M. D'Orbigny 

 affirmed, with equal emphasis, that " a Peruvian is more different from a Pa- 

 tagonian, and a Patagonian from a Guarani than is a Greek from an Ethio- 



* Zoologie Geographique. Cassel, 1784. L'Homme. 



t llistoire naturelle du Genre Ilumain, Paris, 1824, t. i. p. 4S0. 



X Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America. London, 1S52, vol. i. 

 p. 325. 



\ Dietionnaire d'uistoire naturelle. L'Homme. 



|| Le Regne Animal, p. 103. 



< \,w Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. By Benjamin Smith Barton, 

 M. D.. Phila.,1798, p. lxxv. 



** Untersut hung Uber Amerikas Bevolkerung aus dem alten Continente. Leipzig, 1810. Mith- 

 ridates, 3 Th. 2 Abth. p. 340. See also Wiseman's Twelve Lectures on the Connection between 

 Science and Revealed Religion, London, 1842, p. SO. 



tt Bonn's Edition, vol. i. p, 313. 



Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Vol. 1, New Series, 1818, p. xi.; vol. 3, 

 PI>. Tij, 77. 



;>;! Archa;ologia Americana, vol. 2, pp. 5, 118. 



I!! P- 63. 



\ ' An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America. 2d edit. 

 Philada., 1844, p. 5. 



[May, 



