56 ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



formed on new plans of ideas." His contemporary, Turgor, professed not to under- 

 stand what was meant by "plans of ideas;" but he was then a youth, a little over 

 twenty years of age, and aiming to write a smart criticism on the essay of Maupertuis. 



Jefferson's remarks in his Notes on Virginia, Quere IX, contain the idea that 

 Schlegel subsequently made productive. " Were vocabularies formed of all the 

 languages spoken in North and South America, with the inflections of their nouns 

 and verbs, their principles of regimen and concord, it would furnish opportunities 

 to those skilled in the languages of the Old World to compare them with these, 

 and hence to construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the 

 human race." 1 



The labors of Dr. Barton are entitled to the highest praise ; but they were in a 

 path which had been travelled before. His comparisons related almost exclusively 

 to words, their sense, and etymology, and did not penetrate to the vital principle 

 that controls their regimen, as the vital principle of a plant determines the form of 

 its growth. Pursuing the same line of investigation, he advanced further than his 

 predecessors, and having, with great patience and industry, accumulated a larger 

 stock of materials, he very much extended the field of inquiry. 



As early as 1708, Adrian Keland, distinguished as an oriental scholar and a 

 philological writer, published, at Utrecht, a dissertation on the languages of Ame- 

 rica. The dialects he had examined were, as enumerated by him, the Brazilian, 

 the Peruvian, the Chilian, the Poconchi or Pocoman, the Carib, the Mexican, the 

 Virginian, the Algonkin, and the Huron. That which he called the " Virginian" 

 was the language of Eliot's Bible and Grammar, and his specimens of the Algonkin 

 and the Huron were derived from the vocabularies of Baron de la Hontan. He 

 states, as the result of his observations, that, while most of the languages of Europe, 

 Asia, and Africa, can easily be traced to their origin, it is very different with those 

 of America ; as, on comparing the latter with others, it is almost impossible to dis- 

 cover sufficient resemblance to excite even a suspicion of what people took posses- 

 sion of this vast continent. Yet, supposing that the New World must have received 

 its population from the Old, he seeks an explanation for the radical changes of 

 speech in the known fact, that the priests and chiefs of some tribes created a lan- 

 guage for themselves, purposely unintelligible to the lower orders, which, from being 

 exclusively a court language, might gradually be communicated to the people, and 

 supersede their own. To this he adds the fluctuating tendency of all speech, in 

 the absence of written symbols to give permanency to sounds. If any relation is 

 to be found between the tongues of the two hemispheres, he thinks it must be 

 looked for among the languages of Asia. He inserts an Icelandic vocabulary, by 

 which, he says, "they who imagine there is any affinity between the languages of 

 the North and those of America may be undeceived." Even Clavigero, the con- 

 temporary of Jefferson and Barton, was somewhat in advance of them in express- 



1 It is stated that President Jefferson had himself gathered vocabularies which, at some interval of 

 leisure from public employments, he intended to digest and publish; but in 1801 his MSS. were 

 destroyed by fire, and he had not the heart to commence his work anew. Schoolcraft's Hist, of the 

 Cond. and Prosp. of the Indians, II, 356. 



