THE LOST ATLANTIS. 115 
mere correspondence in the agglutination characteristic of a very widely diffused class 
of speech. But we, thus far, look in vain for traces of a common genealogy such as those 
which, on the one hand, correlate the Semitic and Aryan families of Asia and Europe 
with parent stocks of times anterior to history, and on the other, with ramifications of 
modern centuries. We have, moreover, to deal mainly with the languages of uncivilised 
races. To the continent north of the Gulf of Mexico, the grand civilising art of the 
metallurgist remained to the last unknown; and in Mexico, it appears as a gift of recent 
origin, derived from Central America. The Asiatic origin of the art of Tubalcain has, 
indeed, been pretty generally assumed, both for Central and Southern America; but by 
mere inference. In doing so, we are carried back to some mythic Quetzalcoatl: for neither 
the metallurgist, nor his art was introduced in recent centuries. Assuming, for the sake 
of argument, the dispersion of a common population of Asia and America, already familiar 
with the working of metals, and with architecture, sculpture and other kind redarts, at a 
date coeval with the founding of Tyre, “the daughter of Sidon,” what help does ‘inguage 
give us in favour of such a postulate ? We have great language groups, such as the Huron- 
Iroquois, extending of old from the St. Lawrence to North Carolina; the Algonkin, from 
Hudson Bay to South Carolina; the Dakotan from the Mississippi to the Rocky Moun- 
tains ; the Athabascan, from the Eskimo frontier, within the Arctic circle, to New Mexico; 
and the Tinné family of languages west of the Rocky Mountains, from the Youkon and 
Mackenzie Rivers, far south on the Pacific slope. With those, as with the more cultured 
languages, or rather languages of the more cultured races, of Central and Southern 
America, elaborate comparisons have been made with vocabularies of Asiatic languages ; 
but the results are, at best, vague. Curious points of agreement have, indeed, been 
demonstrated, inviting to further research ; but as yet the evidence of relationship mainly 
rests on correspondence in structure. The agglutinative suffixes are common to the 
Eskimo and many American Indian tongues. Dr. H. Rink describes the polysynthetic 
process in the Eskimo language as founded on radical words, to which additional or im- 
perfect words, or affixes, are attached ; and on the inflexion, which, for transitive verbs, 
indicates subject as well as object, likewise by addition. But, while Professor Flower 
unhesitatingly characterises the Eskimo as belonging to the typical North Asiatic Mongols ; 
he, at the same time, speaks of them as almost as perfectly isolated in their Arctic home 
“as an island population.” Nevertheless, the same structure is common to their language 
and to those of the great North American families already named. All alike present, in an 
exaggerated form, the characteristic structure of the Ural-Altaic or Turanian group of 
Asiatic languages. 
Race-type corresponds in the Old and New World. A comparison of languages by 
means of the vocabularies of the two continents, yields no such correspondence. All the 
more, therefore, is the American student of comparative philology stimulated to Investigate 
the significance of the polysynthetic characteristic found to pertain to so many—though by 
no means to all,—of the languages of this continent. The relationship which it suggests to 
the agglutinative languages of Asia, furnishes a subject of investigation not less interesting 
to American students, alike of the science of language, and of the whole comprehensive 
questions which anthropology embraces, than the relations of the Romance languages of 
Europe to the parent Latin ; or of Latin itself, and all the Aryan languages, ancient and 
modern, not only to Sanskrit and Zend, but to the indeterminate stock which furnished 
