EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. 237 



of the word wulet, pretty ; gat, part of the word wichgat, 

 signifying a leg or paw ; schis, conveying the idea of littleness. 

 In the same tongue, a youth is called pilape, a word com- 

 pounded from the first part of pilsit, innocent, and the latter 

 part of lenape, a man. Thus, it will be observed, a number 

 of parts of words are taken and thrown together, by a process 

 which has been happily termed agglutination, so as to form 

 one word, conveying a complicated idea. There is also an 

 elaborate system of inflection ; in nouns, for instance, there is 

 one kind of inflection to express the presence or absence of 

 vitality, and another to express number. The genius of the 

 language has been described as accumulative j it " tends rather 

 to add syllables or letters, making further distinctions in objects 

 already before the mind, than to introduce new words." 1 Yet 

 it has also been shown very distinctly, that these languages 

 are based in words of one syllable, like those of the Chinese 

 and Polynesian families ; all the primary ideas are thus ex- 

 pressed : the elaborate system of inflection and agglutination 

 is shown to be simply a farther development of the language- 

 forming principle, as it may be called or the Chinese system 

 may be described as an arrestment of this principle at a par- 

 ticular early point. 



Dr. Prichard alludes to a mixture of somewhat vague notions, 

 partly derived from physical theories, and partly from history, 

 or rather from mythology, which refers the origin of human 

 races to high mountainous tracts. " The tops of mountains," 

 he says, " first emerged above the surface of the primeval 

 ocean, and, in the language of some philosophical theorists, 



first became the scene of the organizing life of nature 



Geological theories give their part to render these notions 

 popular ; not only the late speculations of the Count de Buffon, 

 and the learned Bailly, but the opinions of ancient philo- 

 sophers, who maintained, before the time of Justin and Pliny, 

 that the mountains of High Asia must have been the part of 

 the world first inhabited by men ; inasmuch as that region 

 must have been first refrigerated in the gradual cooling of the 

 surface of our planet, and first raised sufficiently above the 

 surface of our ocean." It may be remarked that, in the pro- 

 gress of geology, the evidences of the sea having once covered 

 various parts of the earth to a considerable height, are become 

 so familiar, that no one now doubts of such a phenomenon, 



1 Schoolcraft. 



