i6o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



much weaker when few or no words can be claimed as similar, and 

 the whole burden of proof has to be borne by similar modes of word- 

 formation and syntax, as, for example, in the researches of Aymonier 

 and Keane tending to trace the Malay group of languages into con- 

 nection with the Khmer or Cambodian. Within America the philolo- 

 gist uses with success the strong method of combined dictionary and 

 grammar in order to define his great language-groups, such as the 

 Algonquin extending from Hudson's Bay to Virginia, the Athapascan 

 from Hudson's Bay to New Mexico, both crossing Canada in their vast 

 range. But attempts to trace analogies between lists of words in 

 Asiatic and American languages, though they may have shown some 

 similarities deserving further inquiry, have hardly proved an amount 

 of correspondence beyond what chance coincidence would be capable of 

 producing. Thus, when it comes to judging of affinities between the 

 great American language-families, or of any of them with the Asiatic, 

 there is only the weaker method of structure to fall back on. Here 

 the Esquimau analogy seems to be with North Asiatic languages. It 

 would be defined as agglutinative-sufiixing, or, to put the definition 

 practically, an Esquimau word of however portentous length is treat- 

 ed by looking out in the dictionary the first syllable or two, which 

 will be the root, the rest being a string of modifying suflixes. The 

 Esquimau thus presents in an exaggerated form the characteristic 

 structure of the vast Ural-Altaic or Turanian group of Asiatic lan- 

 guages. In studying American languages as a whole, the first step is 

 to discard the generalization of Duponceau as to the American lan- 

 guages from Greenland to Cape Horn being united together, and dis- 

 tinguished from those of other parts of the world, by a common char, 

 acter of polysynthetism, or combining whole sentences into words. 

 The real divergences of structure in American language-families are 

 brought clearly into view in the two dissertations of M. Lucien 

 Adam, which are the most valuable papers of the Congr^s Interna- 

 tional des Americanistes. Making special examination of sixteen lan- 

 guages of North and South America, Adam considers these to belong 

 to a number of independent or irreducible families, as they would have 

 been, he says, "had there been primitively several human couples." 

 It may be worth suggesting, however, that the task of the johilologer 

 is to exhaust every possibility of discovering connections between lan- 

 guages before falling back on the extreme hypothesis of independent 

 origins. These American language-families have grammatical tenden- 

 cies in common, which suggest original relationship, and in some of 

 these even correspond with languages of other regions in a way which 

 may indicate connection rather than chance. For instance, the dis- 

 tinction of gender, not by sex as male and female, but by life as 

 animate and inanimate, is familiar in the Algonquin group ; in Cree 

 niuskesin = shoe (moccasin) makes its plural mushesind, while esJcwayu 

 = woman (squaw) makes its plural eskwaywulc. Now, this kind of gen- 



