December 2, 1878. 



Dr. Forbes in the chair. Eleven members present. 

 Mr. Nipher made a few remarks on the earthquake of Novem- 

 ber iSth. 



Judge Hohnes read the following note upon the 



SANSCRIT AND NAHUATL. 



In the "Anales del Museo Nacional de Mexico" (t. i. 2, p. 79), Senor 

 G. Mendoza institutes a comparison between numerous words of the 

 Sanscrit and Nahuatl languages, and points out in them a striking iden- 

 tity of sound and sense, from which he infers some former connection 

 between the two peoples. He suggests two different routes of migration 

 by which such a connection may be explained: i. By means of some 

 tropical extension of the continent in the first stages of the Quaternary 

 epoch, whereby a Sanscrit-speaking people may have reached Mexico ; 

 and 2. An eastward migration of the progenitors of the Toltecs, Olmecs, 

 and Aztecs, from the banks of the Ganges and the Indus, across the 

 Himalayas, and over the plateaus of Thibet, the deserts of Mongolia, 

 and the frozen regions of Siberia, to Behring's Straits, and thence by 

 Alaska to Mexico. And he refers to the Puratana Sastra, which relates, 

 that, some sevoi thousand years before, a prince Yodah descended with 

 his people from the Himalayas to attach Asgarta, the rich capital of India, 

 and that, in consequence of religious wars following, there were large mi- 

 grations of persecuted people to distant regions; and among them (he 

 supposes) may have been the progenitors of the men who spoke the 

 Nahuatl tongue in Mexico : and so the identities with the idiom of the 

 Brahmans would be explained. 



There are some serious objections to this theory. The Aryan-speaking 

 peoples belonged originally to the white race, whose centre of origin is 

 traced to the headwaters of the Oxus and Jaxartes in the basin of the 

 Caspian Sea, north of the Himalayas. The Sanscrit-speaking Aryans of 

 the Indus and Ganges were a branch of that same white race, and de- 

 scendedfrom that original centre of origin, southward, into the valleys of 

 those rivers at a date preceding the westward migrations of the Indo- 

 Germanic peoples from the same original centre. This is the result of all 

 philological and historical investigation hitherto. The Chevalier Bunsen 

 places the date of this white Aryan race, in that common centre of origin, 

 at a period at least 20,000 years ago. The Sanscrit form of the language 

 received its developement in the valley of the Ganges and the Indus. 

 The identities found in the Nahuatl might possibly show a derivation 

 direct from the original form of the Aryan speech as it existed, prime- 

 vally, in the earliest centre of origin rather than directly from the 

 Sanscrit branch in India. This supposition would involve a migra- 

 tion only from the basin of the Caspian across Mongolia to Behring's 



