[CAMPBELL] AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY 77 
I have already said that Professor Cyrus Thomas now agrees with 
me in regarding the Huastec-Maya-Quiche family of Central America as 
of the same origin. Their dialects are very simple and are all preposing. 
At the last meeting of this Society, the abstract of a paper by me was 
read in which I furnished the first decipherment yet made of certain 
documents written in their peculiar hieroglyphic, the nearest form of 
writing to which is found on Easter Island in the Pacific. In that paper 
I have indicated the purely Malay origin of the Mayas, Quiches and 
Cachiquels of Yucatan and Guatemala to which the personal appearance 
of these peoples, their religion and mythology, arts and customs. testify. 
The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg and Dr. Brinton of Philadelphia have 
translated the Maya chronicles and those of the Quiches and the Cachi- 
quels, so that they are now accessible to every reader of French and 
English. The inscribed monuments translated by me have no great 
antiquity, belonging to the early part of the fifteenth century : but 
there is every reason to think, from the displacement of the family to 
which they belong to the eastward by the Mexicans, that they preceded 
the fugitives from Japan in their occupation of the American coast. 
Other members of the same family were driven farther east into the 
islands of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, where Columbus 
found them. 
Many tribes of South America now dwelling in the castern parts of 
that continent had a similar origin, as their languages and customs 
testify. Such are those that constitute the Mbaya-Abipone family of 
the Gran Chaco whose vocabulary and grammatical forms, as given in 
the earliest notices of them, are almost identical with those of the 
Friendly or Tonga islanders. The Tupi-Guarani family of Brazil is very 
different and seems to claim kindred with the semi-Papuan peoples whom 
the Fijians best illustrate. There are Papuan remnants in the Malay 
Archipelago and all the way south to Australia, whose postponing gram- 
mar and lexical peculiarities differentiate them from the true Malay- 
Polynesian. It does not follow therefore that a postponing language 
always denotes a northern Asiatic stock, so that the philological ethnolo- 
gist in America will do well to make himself acquainted with the peculi- 
arities of Papuan speech as found in New Guinea, the New Hebrides, 
and in Australia. Some of our west coast tribes have a Papuan air, and 
while employing many Malay-Polynesian terms acquired by long contact, 
speak languages that indicate a different source. A general acquaint- 
ance with the Japo-Siberian, the Malay-Polynesian, and the Papuan 
dialects is not a serious undertaking for an earnest student of American 
origines, and by acquiring it there is little doubt of his being able to 
solve all the main problems connected with our Indians. Japanese and 
Corean grammars and lexicons are now easily procured, while recent 
works in the line of Klaproth’s Asia Polyglotta will give an insight to 
