116 DANIEL WILSON ON 
the parent roots, the grammatical forms, and that whole class of words still recognisable 
as the common property of the whole Aryan family. Sanskrit was a dead language three 
thousand years ago; the English language, as such, cannot claim to have endured much 
more than fourteen centuries, yet both partake of the same common property of numerals 
and familiar terms existing under certain modifications in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, 
Celtic, German, Anglo-Saxon, and in all the Romance languages. Thus far the American 
philologist has been unable to show any such genealogical relationship pervading the | 
native languages ; or to recover specific evidence of affinities to languages, and so to races 
of other continents. There are, indeed, linguistic families, such as some already referred 
to, indicating a common descent among widely dispersed tribes; but this has its chief 
interest in relation to another aspect of the question. 
Professor Max Miiller has drawn attention to the tendency of the languages of America 
towards an endless multiplication of distinct dialects. Those again have been grouped by 
the synthetic process of Hervas into eleven families—seven for the northern continent, 
and four for South America. But we are as yet only on the threshold of this important 
branch of research. In two papers contributed by M. Lucien Adam to the “ Congrès Inter- 
national des Americanistes,” he gives the results of a careful examination of sixteen 
languages of North and South America; and arrives at the conclusion that they belong to 
a number of independent families as essentially distinct as they would have been “ had 
there been primitively several human pairs.” Dr. Brinton, one of the highest authorities 
on any question connected with native American languages, contributed a paper to the 
“ American Antiquarian ” (Jan. 1886), “On the study of the Nahuatl language.” This 
language, which is popularly known as Aztec, he strongly commends to the study of 
American philologists. It is one of the most completely organised of Indian languages, 
has a literature of considerable extent and variety, and is still in use by upwards of half 
a million of people. It is from this area, southward through Central America, and in the 
great seat of native South American civilisation, that we can alone hope to recover direct 
evidence of ancient intercourse between the Old and the New World. But, here again, 
the complexities of language seem to grow apace. In Dr. Brinton’s “ Notes on the Mangue, 
an extinct language formerly spoken in Nicaragua,” he states, as a result of his later 
studies, that the belief which he once entertained of some possible connection between 
this dialect and the Amyara of Peru, has not been confirmed on further examination. This, 
therefore, tends to sustain the prevailing opinion of scholars that there is no direct affilia- 
tion between the languages of North and South America. All this is suggestive either of 
an idea, such as that which Agassiz favoured in his system of natural provinces of the 
animal world, in relation to different types of man, on which he based the conclusion that 
the diverse varieties of American man originated in various centres, and had been distribu- 
ted from them over the entire continent ; or we must assume immigration from different 
foreign centres. Accepting the latter as the more tenable proposition, I long ago sketched 
a scheme of immigration such as seemed to harmonise with the suggestive, though imper- 
fect evidence. This assumed the earliest current of population, in its progress from a sup- 
posed Asiatic cradle-land, to have spread through the islands of the Pacific, and reached 
the South American continent before any excess of population had diffused itself into the 
inhospitable northern steppes of Asia. By an Atlantic oceanic migration, another wave 
of population occupied the Canaries, Madeiras, and the Azores, and so passed to the Antilles, 
