70 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. ix. 



the Quiche and Poconchi of Guatimala, and the Huastec and 

 Totonac of Vera Cruz. Of the Maya, Dr. Daniel Wilson, in his 

 address before the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, says, " It strikingly contrasts in its soft vocalic forms 

 with the languages of the nations immediately to the north of its 

 native area." Here then is the same phenomenon that is pre- 

 sented by the Algonquin languages. I do not propose to make 

 the Mayas Algonquin, or the Algonquins Maya-Quiche, but 

 simply to indicate their common relation to a parent stock. All 

 the Maya-Quiche dialects use prepositions, and prepositions ex- 

 clusively, while the surrounding languages, Aztec, Mixtec, Pima, 

 Tarahumara, &c., employ postpositions. Tue Quiche verb again 

 is the precise analogue of the Algonquin, the only difference 

 being that the pronoun, instead of occupying an initial position, 

 intervenes between the temporal index aud the root. Thus in 

 ca-im-logoh I love, xi-nu-logoh I have loved, and ch-ln-logoh I 

 shall love, ca, xi and ch are the indices of present, past, and 

 future time, xi and ch being the equivalents of the Algonquin 

 gi and ga, or better still of the Cree ki and ka. In Maya also 

 the accusative seems to follow the governing verb as in Algon- 

 quin. There is, however, in these languages an important syn- 

 tactical peculiarity which does not appear in Algonquin so far as 

 is known to me ; it is the postposition of the genitive. Thus in 

 Maya, iipoc Pedro " the hat of Peter " reverses the order of the 

 Iroquois, Dacotah and Choctaw, which is that of the English 

 "Peter's hat." The Algonquin dialects follow the latter order, 

 and it may fairly be asked whether this be not a result of sur- 

 rounding influences rather than one of the original forms of 

 Algonquin speech. Apart from this, however, there are, in the 

 use of prepositions, the preposition of the temporal index and 

 the postposition of the accusative, together with phonetic coin- 

 cidence, links sufficient to ally the x\lgon(|uin with the Maya- 

 Quiche languages. 



The next great family of languages which employs prepositions 

 is found in La Plata and Paraguay on the Gran Chaco, and is 

 known as the Mbaya-Abipone, including the Mocobi, Toba, 

 Leniiua and other dialects. Here again we meet with "soft 

 vocalic forms," contrasting more or less with the manlier utter- 

 ances of the Peruvian and Chileno tribes, who almost invariably 

 employ postpositions. The verb again is essentially the same as 

 that of the Quiche, the pronoun intervening between the tempo- 



