THE LOST ATLANTIS. 121 
to have been displaced by a Sumerian migration by which the Aymara domination was 
established in Peru, and the Maya element introduced into Yucatan. Those movements 
are assumed to belong to an era of civilisation, during which the maritime enterprise 
of the Pacific may have been carried on upon a scale unknown to the most adventurous of 
modern Malay navigators, notwithstanding the essentially maritime character by which 
the race is still distinguished. All this implies that the highway to the Pacific was 
familiar to both continents; and hence a second migration is recognised, in certain 
linguistic relations, between the Siamese and other languages of Indo-China, and the 
Quichua and Aztec of Peru and Mexico. But the problem of the origin of the races of 
this continent, and of the sources of its native civilisation, is still in that preliminary 
stage in which the accumulation of materials on which future induction may be based is 
of more value than the most comprehensive generalisations. 
The vastness of the American twin continents, with their Atlantic and Pacific seaboard 
reaching from the Arctic well nigh to the Antartic circle, furnishes a tempting stimulus to 
theories of migration on the grandest scale, and to the assumption of comprehensive 
schemes of international relations in prehistoric centuries. But they are not more sub- 
stantial than the old legend of Atlantis. The best that can be said of them is that here, at 
any rate, are lines of research in the prosecution of which American ethnologists may 
employ their learning and acumen encouraged by the hope of yet revealing a past not less 
marvellous, and possessing a more personal interest, than all which geology has recovered 
from the testimony of the rocks. But before such can be more than dimly guessed at, the 
patient diligence of many students will be needed to accumulate the needful materials. 
Nor can we afford to delay the task. The Narraganset Bible, the work of Eliot, the 
apostle of the Indians, is the memoria] of a race that has perished; and other nations and 
languages have disappeared since his day, with no such invaluable record of their 
character. Mr. Horatio Hale published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical 
Society, in 1883, a paper on the ‘‘Tutelo Tribe and Language,” derived from Nikonha, the 
last survivor of a once powerful tribe of North Carolina. To Dr. Brinton, we owe the 
recent valuable notes on the Mangue, another extinct language. On our own North- 
western prairies the buffalo has disappeared, and the Indian must follow. On all hands, 
we are called upon to work diligently while it is yet time, in order to accumulate the 
materials out of which the history of this western hemisphere is to be evolved. 
It accords with the idea of Polynesian genealogy, that indications suggestive of 
grammatical affinity have been noted in languages of South America, in their mode of 
expressing the tense of the verb; in the formation of causative, reciprocal, potential and 
locative verbs by affixes; and in the general system of compound word structure. The 
incorporation of the particle with the verbal root, appears to embody the germ of the more 
comprehensive American holophrasms. Such affinities point to others more markedly 
Asiatic ; for analogies recognised between the languages of the Deccan and those of the 
Polynesian group in relation to the determinative significance of the formative particles 
on the verbal root, reappear in some of the characteristic peculiarities of American 
languages. On this subject, the Rev. Richard Garnett remarked, in a communication to the 
Philological Society, that most of the native American languages of which we have definite 
information, bear a general analogy alike to the Polynesian family and to the languages 
of the Deccan, in their methods of distinguishing the various modifications of time ; and 
Sec. II. 1886. 16. 
