72 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Half a century ago, Mr. John Macintosh, of Toronto, published a 
little book containing extracts from the writings of Santini and other 
travellers among the tribes of Siberia relating to their appearance, dress, 
warfare, religion, games, manners and customs, and paralleled these 
extracts with accounts of the American Indians published by well-known 
authorities. Humboldt in his day, and within a comparatively recent 
time, Commodore Perry’s journalist, pointed out striking coincidences 
between Japanese custom, science, and art and those of the Northwestern 
peoples of South America, Lately, Mr. Kennan, in his “Tent Life in 
Siberia,” identified our Indians in general appearance with the Koriaks 
and Tchuktchis of that country ; and, but the other day, Mr. Frank G. 
Carpenter found American features in Corea and Japan. Many Japanese 
junks have been driven to the Pacific coast of this continent within 
modern historical time, and some of their crews have taken up their abode 
where their vessels grounded. One feels, however, that such isolated 
facts and general coincidences, while sufficient to stimulate inquiry, are 
not ground enough for the foundation of a scientific dictum. Mere 
physical resemblance proves little, inasmuch as, in this continent, even 
among peoples whose languages show them to be closely related, there is 
often found a very great variety of formation and feature. Our 
aborigines have short heads, long heads and flat heads, and brains of a 
great variety of capacities. We have tall Dakotas and Patagonians, and 
stunted Eskimos and Fuegians. The civilized Peruvians and Mexicans 
appear to have been men of Japanese stature ; while, judging by the 
Palenque Tablet of the Cross, the Cachiquels, who belonged to the 
Huastec-Maya-Quiche family, possessed the large well-nourished frame 
of the better class of South Sea {slanders. 
Coming to scientific demonstration, perhaps the first to definitely 
associate our Indians with Old World peoples by means of language was 
Dr. Latham, who said they had all their affinities with the Peninsular 
Mongolidæ, by which name he designated the Japanese and their related 
tribes. So far as the Algonquins, the Maya-Quiches, the Caribs, the 
Tupi-Guaranis and the Mbaya-Abipones are concerned, this is not true; 
therefore Dr. Latham must have had in view such tribes as the Dakotas, 
Iroquois and Choctaws. At the meeting of the first Americanist Con- 
gress, Professor Julien Vinson compared that isolated Turanian tongue, 
the Basque of the Pyrenees, with which he is thoroughly acquainted, 
with an Iroquois and two Algonquin dialects. He exhibited coincidences 
in grammatical construction, especially between the Basque and the Jro- 
quois but failed to connect the vocabularies. Working on larger 
material than M. Vinson had at hand, I succeeded in discovering the 
laws of phonetic change or permutation of letters governing the relations 
of the Basque and the Iroquois, and the same were published in the 
Proceedings of the Canadian Institute. About the same time, an 
