THIRTEENTH ORDINARY MEETING. rl 
lies. In all of these tribes we may recognize the barbarous Chichi- 
mecs through whom the Aztecs passed on their way to empire. But 
of the same race are the central stocks, the Dacotah and Pawnee ; 
and to no other belong the eastern families of the Huron-Cherokees, 
and the Choctaw-Muskogees. The Algonquins of the north, like the 
Maya-Quichés of Central America, are of a totally distinct branch of 
the Great Turanian division. The samples of Mound Builder lan- 
guage furnished by the Davenport, the Grave Creek, and the Brush 
Creek Stones add their evidence to that of the written characters in 
favour of a connection of the Mound Builders with the Aztecs and 
related tribes. The Dacotah Mandans, the Choctaws, the Natchez, 
and the Aztecs, have been severally set forth as the Mound Builders: 
The true Mound Builders may have been none of these, but a distinct 
tribe of Allighewi or Alleghenies, for whom we must look elsewhere, 
still, however, to find them a portion of the same great family. 
Ancient traces of this tribe appear in the Hittite country of the 
Nairi in Mesopotamia, where Elisansu was situated ; in the Alazonus 
river of Albania in the Caucasus ; in the nation of the Halizoni of 
Pontus mentioned by Homer ; in the Scythic Alazonians of Herodo- 
tus ; and in Alzania, a mountain region of the Basques. It is not at 
all improbable that the ancient name survives in those of the Alasar 
and Allakaweah, sub-tribes of the Dacotahs, but this only tends to 
prove that a people of the same race as the Dacotahs, and not neces- 
sarily the Dacotahs themselves, were the Mound Builders. 
There is abundant reason for believing the tradition of most of the 
American tribes I have mentioned to the effect that their ancestors 
passed over the sea or great river and traversed a region of intense 
cold before arriving at their destination in more hospitable climates. 
Kamtchatka must have been their point of departure from the Old 
World, whether they reached that point from the Siberian Desert or 
journeyed thitherward from Corea and Japan by the Kurile Islands. 
There they set foot on the Aleutian chain which carried them safely 
over to the coast of Alaska. In Kamtchatdale there are many Aztec 
traces, and some which exhibit an exaggeration of the peculiarity of 
Aztec speech with which this paper is mainly occupied. Such is the 
rendering of the Aztec verb ¢lacotla, to love, by the elongated but dis- 
tinctly recognizable form tallochtelasin. And, with the Kamtchatdale, 
the Aztec connection, which has been illustrated by comparative 
vocabularies, embraces all the hitherto unclassified languages of Nor- 
