114 DANIEL WILSON ON 
by the Allophyliæ of Europe before the intrusion of Aryans. The forms of its grammar 
differ widely from those of any Semitic, or Indo-European tongue, placing it in the same 
class with Mongol, East African, and American languages. Here, therefore, is a tempting 
glimpse of possible aflinities; and Professor Whitney, accordingly, remarks in his “ Life 
and Growth of Languages,” that the Basque “ forms a suitable stepping-stone from which 
to enter the peculiar linguistic domain of the New World, since there is no other dialect 
of the Old World which so much resembles in structure the American languages.” But 
this glimpse of possible relationship has proved, thus far, illusory. In their morphological 
character, certain American and Asiatic languages have a common agglutinative structure, 
which in the former is developed into their characteristic polysynthetic attribute. With 
this, the Eskuarian system of affixes corresponds. But beyond the general structure, there 
is no such evidence of affinity, either in the vocabularies or grammar, as direct affiliation 
might be expected to show. Elements common to the Anglo-American of the nineteenth 
century and the Sanskrit-speaking race beyond the Indus, in the era of Alexander of 
Macedon, are suggested at once by the grammatical structure of their languages ; whereas 
there is nothing in the resemblance between the Basque and any of the North American 
languages that is not compatible with a “stepping-stone” from Asia to America by the 
islands of the Pacific. The most important of all the native American languages in their 
bearing on this interesting enquiry—those of Central America—are only now receiving 
adequate attention, Startling evidence may yet reward the diligence of students; but, so 
far as language furnishes any clue to affinity of race, no American language thus far 
discloses such a relationship, as, for example, enabled Dr. Pritchard to suggest that the 
western people of Europe, to whom the Greeks gave the collective name of AéAraz, and 
whose languages has been assumed by all previous ethnologists as furnishing evidence 
that they were precursors of the Aryan immigrants, in reality justified their classification 
in the same stock. 
But while thus far, the evidence of language is, at best, vague and indefinite in its 
response to the enquiry for proofs of relationship of the races of America to those of the 
Old World ; physiological comparisons lend no confirmation to the idea of an indigenous 
native race, with special affinities and adaptation to its peculiar environment, and with 
languages all of one class, the ramifications from a single native stem. So far as physical 
affinities can be relied upon, the man of America, in all his most characteristic racial 
diversities, is of Asiatic origin. His near approximation to the Asiatic Mongol is so 
manifest as to have led observers of widely different opinions in all other respects, to 
concur in classing both under the same great division: the Mongolian of Pickering, the 
American Mongolidæ of Latham, the Mongoloid of Huxley. Professor Flower, in an able 
discussion of the varieties of the human species, addressed to the Anthropological Institute 
of Great Britain in 1885, unhesitatingly classes the Eskimo as the typical North Asiatic 
Mongol. In other American races he notes as distinctive features the characteristic form 
of the nasal bones, the well-developed superciliary ridge, and retreating forehead ; but 
the resemblance is so obvious in many other respects, that he finally includes them all 
among the members of the Mongolian type. If, then, the American Mongol came 
originally from Asia, or sprung from the common stock of which the Asiatic Mongol is the 
typical representative, within any such period as even earliest Pheenician history would 
embrace, much more definite traces of affinity{are to be looked for in his language than 
