192 SYSTEMS OF CONSANGUINITY AND AFFINITY 



There are some discrepancies in the forms of the four Gulf nations, which it is 

 unnecessary to trace. In a system so elaborate and complicated, absolute agree- 

 ment in minute details would not be expected. Whatever is fundamental in the 

 common system is found in the most unmistakable manner in the Chocta form. 

 Its identity Avith the Seneca or typical system is undoubted ; and we are again led 

 to the same inference found in the previous cases, that it was derived by these 

 nations, with the blood, from the same common original source. 



II. Cherokee. The Cherokee system of relationship, in its two forms, agrees 

 so fully with that last presented, that it is unnecessary to consider it separately. 

 There are some general observations, however, upon this and other Indian lan- 

 guages, and upon the bearing of the deviations from uniformity in their systems of 

 relationship upon the question of their near or remote ethnic affiliations, Avhich 

 may be made in this connection. In grammatical structure all of the Ganowanian, 

 languages are believed to agree. But our knowledge concerning them is neither 

 sufficiently extensive nor minute to raise these languages to the rank of a family of 

 languages in the sense of the Aryan and Semitic upon the basis of ascertained lingu- 

 istic affinities. Very few of the whole number comparatively have been studied. No 

 common standards of evidence upon which particular dialects shall be admitted into 

 the family, or rejected from the connection, have been adopted. They have been 

 reduced with tolerable accuracy to a number of stock languages upon the basis of 

 identity of vocables ; but the basis and principles upon which these stock languages 

 shall be united into a family of languages remain to be determined. These dia- 

 lects and languages have passed through a remarkable experience from the vast 

 dimensions of the areas over which they have spread. By that inexorable law 

 wliich adjusts numbers to subsistence in given areas, the Ganowanian family has 

 been perpetually disintegrated, through all of its branches, at every stage of increase 

 of numbers above this ratio. In the progress of ages they have been scattered, in 

 feeble bands, over two entire continents, to the repression and waste of their intel- 

 lectual powers, and to the sacrifice of all the advantages that flow from civil and 

 social organization in combination with numbers. Every subdivision, when it 

 became permanent, resulted in the formation of a new dialect, which was intrusted 

 to the keeping of a small number of people. Although nations speaking dialects 

 of the same stock language have in general maintained a continuity of territorial 

 possession, it was impossible to prevent subdivision, displacement, and overthrow in 

 the course of ages ; so that the end of each thousand years would probably find no 

 stock language in the same geographical location. As a result of these subdivisions 

 and its train of influences, these languages have been in a perpetual flux. The 

 advance and decline of nations, the development and impoverishment of particular 

 dialects, the propagation of words from one dialect into another by intermarriage, 

 and by the absorption into one nation of the broken fragments of another, have 

 contributed, with other causes not named, to the diversities which now exist. 

 Tlieir system of relationship, however, has survived the mutations of language, and 

 still delivers a clear and decisive testimony concerning the blood affinity of all 

 these nations. It is not at all improbable that it will be found a more efficient 

 as well as compendious instrument, for demonstrating their original unity, than 

 the grammatical structure of their dialects could that be comprehensively ascer- 



