68 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
development of the human species on this continent, seeing that it is 
deficient in anthropoid apes, although one worthy naturalist suggested 
that the bear, which, on the defence, assumes an erect form, might furnish 
man with a fitting progenitor. The profession that tribes and nations in 
all ages make to have been autochthonous are no more to be believed now 
of the Mohawks than they were twenty-five centuries ago of the Athen- 
ians. Almost all peoples come in time to associate their traditions with the 
scenes of their present home. It is morally certain that the Chinese 
originally dwelt in Babylonia, and that the Japanese once dwelt in 
northern India, but all their traditions, even their histories, are located 
within the bounds of their present empires. There is no physical pecu- 
arity in which all American Indians of pure blood agree with the excep- 
tion of their straight black hair, and that is common to all pure blooded 
Turanians, excluding Negroes and Papuans, in Europe, Asia, Africa and 
Polynesia. A great deal has been made of American languages under 
the term polysynthesis, but, as a matter of fact, a very large number of 
our aboriginal tongues are not polysynthetic, while some are almost 
monosyllabic, and the polysynthesis of America hasits exact counterparts 
in Turanian-Europe and Asia and in the Tagala and similar dialects of 
the Malay. Professor Max Müller has protested against making poly- 
synthesis a characteristic of any linguistic group, and MM. Jules Vinson 
and Lucien Adam have shown that American speech is not by its means 
differentiated from that of the rest of the world. 
To the casual observer all Indians, dressed in the shabby clothes of 
the white man, unkempt and unobtrusive, may look alike, so that the 
generic name Indian or Red Man does duty for each and all; but our 
aborigines themselves and those who have lived among them in their 
native condition know better. No such an one would mistake an Eskimo 
for a Déné, a Déné for an Algonquin, or an Algonquin for a Dakota or 
Iroquois, any more than he would confound an Aztec with a Maya, ora 
Quiche, or a Chinook with a Haidah. Indeed, with scientific investiga- 
tors the great difficulty is not that of differentiation but of integrate 
classification. This classification proceeds almost entirely on the basis 
of language, in spite of the vast variety of American dialects. Chateau- 
briand gives a peculiar character to the courtly Huron as distinguished 
from the savage Iroquois, his enemy and almost his exterminator, but it 
has long been well known that the two peoples are next of kin. The 
beloved people of the Cherokees, as Bancroft terms them, used to be 
regarded as a clan by themselves, till attention was drawn to a suggestion 
by Adelung in the Mithradates, when Mr. Horatio Hale exhibited the 
radical unity of their language with that of the Huron-[roquois. This 
work of classification is far from complete as yet. One of the families 
most abundant in dialects past and present is the Algonquin which has 
great representation in Canada, embracing the extinct Beothik of New- 
