go TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE, [Vor VI. 
—the Abbé Petitot—-attempts to establish the identity of a fabulous 
nation called Tseguz/ with a prehistoric race surnamed “women” by the 
Northern Dénés on the ground that ¢seguz, he says, means women in 
Déné, while the original sense of Tsequil appears to be “ petticoated 
men.’* Now, the author must know just as well as I do that ¢segud 
means women in no Déné dialect, and he ought to be aware that the 
difference between that pretended word and ?@seguz,> the real equivalent 
of “women,” is as great in Déné as that between, say, day and night. 
Hence his would-be identification falls to the ground through utter 
disregard for the value of consonantal articulation. 
It would be harsh to call this philological bad faith ; much more 
probably it is only blindness caused by an inordinate love of linguistic 
assimilations,; just as the sentence immediately following in his text 
seems to be due to misinformation. Speaking of the Déné language, he 
says that “il a été reconnu appartenir a la méme famille que le 
toltéque.”§ In the first place, many well-informed Americanists speak 
no longer of the Toltecs who, they declare, never existed as a nation, 
and therefore had no distinctive language;|| and then if by éolteque 
the author means, with some apparently mistaken ethnologists, the 
dialect of some ancestors of the Aztecs, he should certainly know that 
the idiom of the latter has no more affinity with the Déné than that of 
the Caribs or of the Fuegians. 
In the same publication the author endeavours to identify the ¢saa, 
tsade of some northern Dénés with the ¢saw of the Egyptians. Ommmzs 
comparatio claudicat is an axiom well known to the schoolmen, but which 
should never apply to linguistic comparisons. Yet I dare say that the 
above not only “hobbles,” but even cannot stand at all, for two reasons. 
First, ésaa or tsade should be written as it is pronounced, not as may be 
- convenient in the interest of the thesis. Now the author knows-so well 
that this should be “saa or ¢¢saa (the apostrophe or the double t deno- 
ting the lingual explosion), that he spells it himself according to the 
second orthography in his published dictionary. This exploding sound 
is so important from a philological standpoint that, while even conso- 
nants are liable to occasionally disappear altogether through the gradual 
alterations customary with all living languages, this American character- 
* Six Légendes Américaines identifiées a Uhistotre de Moise, etc., Paris, A. Hennuyer, p. 720 
+ The apostrophe indicates the lingual explosion proper to many American idioms. 
t It could not be construed as due to any typographic error, as identical appreciations of similarly altered 
words are to be found elsewhere in the course of the work referred to. 
§ Six Legendes, etc., p. 720. 
|| See ‘The American Race,” by Dr. D. G. Brinton, p. 129. 
