THE LOST ATLANTIS. 119 
spoils of the decaying Roman empire. Nor was it merely common to tribes of both con- 
tinents. It furnishes another link in the chain of evidence of ancient migration from 
Asia to America; as is proved by its practice in some of the islands of the Pacific, as 
described by Dr. Pickering, and since abundantly confirmed by the forms of Kanaka 
skulls. By following up the traces of this strange custom, perpetuated among the tribes 
on the Pacific coasts both of Northern and Southern America to our own day, we thus once 
more retrace the steps of ancient wanderers and are carried back to centuries, when the 
Macrocephali of the Euxine attracted the observant eye of Hippocrates, and became 
familiar to Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela. 
But the wanderings among the insular races of the Pacific are not limited to such 
remote eras. Later changes are also recorded by other evidence. The direct relationship 
of existing Polynesian languages is not Mongol but Malay; but this is the intrusive 
element of a time long subsequent to the growth of characteristic features which still 
perpetuate traces of Polynesian and American affinities. The number and diversity of the 
languages of this continent, and their essentially native vocabularies, prove that the latter 
have been in process of development from a remote period, free from contact with 
languages which appear to have been still modelling themselves according to the same 
plan of thought in many scattered islands of the Pacific. 
Attention has been given in previous papers to the remarkable amount of culture in 
the languages of some of the barbarous nations of North America, traceable, as I conceive, 
to the important part which the orator played in their deliberative assemblies ; but in 
any attempt to recover the history of the new world by the aid of philology we must 
deal with the languages of its civilised races. Among those, the Nahuatl or Aztec has 
been already referred to; and the Mayas have been noted as a lettered people whose 
hieroglyphic records, and later transcripts of writen documents, are now the object of 
intelligent investigation both by European and American philologists. The Maya language 
strikingly contrasts, in its soft, vocalic forms, with the languages of nations immediately 
to the north of its native area. It is that which, according to Stephens, was affirmed to 
be still spoken by a living race in a region beyond the Great Sierra, extending to Yucatan 
and the Mexican Gulf. Others among the cultured native languages which seem to 
invite special study are the Aymara, and the Quichua. Of these, the latter was the 
classical language of South America, wherein, according to its native historians, the 
Peruvian chroniclers and poets incorporated the national legends. It may be described as 
having occupied a place under Inca rule analogous to that of the Norman French in 
England from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. To those ancient, cultured languages 
of the seats of an indigenous civilisation on this continent, and with a literature of their 
own, attention is now happily directed. The students of American ethnology begin to 
realise that the buried mounds of Assyria are not richer in discoveries relative to the 
ancient history of Asia, than are the monuments, the hieroglyphic records, and the 
languages of Central America and Peru, in relation to a native social life which long 
flourished as an indigenous product of their own West. To this occidental Assyria we 
have to look for an answer to many inquiries, especially interesting to ourselves as 
occupants of the western continent. If its architecture and sculpture, and the hiero- 
glyphic records with which they are enriched, are modifications of a prehistoric Asiatic 
civilisation, it is here that the evidence is to be looked for; and if the arts of the sculptor 
