VARIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH SAPIR. 577 



whicli our evidence docs not allow us to go; tlie last forms lind their 

 reflex in Sanskrit 'pad — pddas. 



All languages that can be shown to bo genetically related — that is, 

 to have sprung from a common source — form a historic unit to which 

 the term linguistic stock or linguistic family is applied. If, now, we 

 were in a position to prove that all known forms of speech could be 

 classified into a single linguistic stock, the apparent parallel above re- 

 ferred to between linguistic and biological reconstruction would be a 

 genuine one. As it is, we must content ourselves ^dth operating with. 

 distinct and, as far as we can tell, genetically unrelated linguistic 

 stocks. The documentary evidence and the reconstructive evidence 

 gained by comparison enable us to reduce the bewildering mass of 

 known languages to a far smaller number of such larger stock groups, 

 yet the absolute number of these latter groups still remains discjuiet- 

 ingly large. The distribution of linguistic stocks presents great irreg- 

 ularities. In Europe there are only three such represented: the Indo- 

 germanic or Aryan, which embraces nearly all the better known lan- 

 guages of the continent; the Ural-Altaic, the best known representa- 

 tives of which are Fimiish, Hungarian, and Turkish; and the Bascjue of 

 southwestern France and northern Spain. On the other hand, that 

 part of aboriginal North America which lies north of Mexico alone em- 

 braces 50 or more distinct linguistic stocks so far as known at pres- 

 ent. Some stocks, as, for instance, the Indogermanic just referred to 

 and the Algonkin of North America, are spread over vast areas and 

 include many peoples or tribes of varying cultures; others, such as the 

 Basque and many of the aboriginal stocks of California, occupy sur- 

 prisingly small territories. It is possible to adopt one of two attitudes 

 toward this phenomenon of the multiplicity of the largest known ge- 

 netic speech aggregates. On the one hand one may assume that the 

 disintegrating effects of gradual linguistic change have in many cases 

 produced such widely differing forms of speech as to make their com- 

 parison for reconstructive purposes of no avail, in other words, that 

 what appear to us to-day to be independent linguistic stocks appear 

 such not because they are in fact historically unrelated, but merely 

 because the evidence of such historical connection has been so ob- 

 scured by time as to be practically lost. On the other hand, one may 

 prefer to see in the existence of mutually independent linguistic stocks 

 evidence of the independent beginnings and development of human 

 speech at dift'erent times and places in the course of the remote history 

 of mankind; there is every reason to believe that in a similar manner 

 many religious concepts and other forms of human thought and 

 activity found widely distributed in time and place have had multiple 

 origins, yet more or less parallel developments. It is naturally fruit- 

 less to attempt to decide bewteen the monogenetic and polygenetic 



