1867.] An Ethnological Inquiry. 555 



An important distinction should here he made in the outset, be- 

 tween those generic characteristics which belong to the very consti- 

 tution of all human speech the world over, and mere specific diflfer- 

 ences, which are peculiar only to a single dialect,or family of tongues. 

 Without this distinction, a true analysis of the subject is impossi- 

 ble, and instead of arriving at a correct classification, we lose ourselves 

 in the midst of a synthesis vague and indefinite. 



Languages, which represent the very fiber of human thought, if 

 we may be allowed the expression, are organisms formed upon the 

 same general skeleton or basis. This results from the fact, that 

 mind and thought are governed by the same uniform laws, in all 

 countries, and during all eras of human progress ; because from its 

 very constitution, mind must ever be identical with mind, in all its 

 various phases and manifestations, throughout the entire universe of 

 thought and intelligence. 



But with this general admission, it is also true, that each genus or 

 group of tongues, and more especially, each species of these several 

 genera, evolves special peculiarities of its own — shapes for itself, for- 

 tuitously it may be, the path of its own determinate career, and rush. 

 es on anomalously, and in a course erratic beyond the self-exagger- 

 ated astuteness of mathematics to predict, to its own particular des- 

 tiny. All possess among themselves certain analogies, which are 

 made evident upon comparing one family with another — and two 

 groups which have a given characteristic in common, difi'er through 

 some other idiosyncrasy, which, notwithstanding, links one of them 

 to a group still more remote. 



Upon examining the structure of the aboriginal languages of 

 America, we find a resemblance even more striking, than that drawn 

 in our former articles, from a comparison of ancient and modern 

 crania, and the' uniformity of the physical type of the various popu- 

 lations of the New World. Philologists, whose business it is to try 

 speech in the crucible of logical analysis, assure us, that in its orig- 

 inal conception, it must have been first fashioned and brought into 

 being by a superior degree of reason and intelligence. But here, in 

 the two Americas, we encounter a group of languages in their struct- 

 ure, similar, une and, homogeneous, bearing on their very texturej 

 both warp and woof, the make of undoubted antiquity, to which even 

 at the hight of their development, our Anglo-Saxon processes of 

 logic and analysis are unknown. 



