178 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 
land of the Nahri are united in the Assyrian inscriptions, so, im 
Basque geography, are Guipuzcoa and Navarre. The Scythie Neuri 
of Herodotus were probably members of the same family. The 
Niquirans, who are Aztecs, settled in Nicaragua, preserve the ancient 
name but have hardened the aspirate into a guttural. 
More than thirty years ago that veteran ethnologist, Dr. Latham, 
wrote the following: ‘‘The Kamskadale, the Koriak, the Aino- 
Japanese, and the Korean, are the Asiatic languages most like those 
of America. (Afterwards he includes the Yukahiri and elsewhere 
connects that language with the Yeniseian.) Unhesitatingly as I 
make this assertion- an assertion for which I have numerous tabu- 
lated vocabularies as proof—I am by no means prepared to say that 
one-tenth part of the necessary work has been done for the parts in 
question ; indeed it is my impression that it is easier to connect 
America with the Kurile Islands and Japan, &c., than it is to make 
Japan and the Kurile Islands, &ec., Asiatic.” Nothing can be 
truer than the above statement made by one whose name should carry 
the greatest weight with all his scientific utterances to the minds of 
scholars. It is therefore simply incomprehensible how a writer on 
philological subjects of such high standing as Mr. Horatio Hale could 
be led to say, ‘“ Philologists are well aware that there is nothing in 
the languages of the American Indians to favour the conjecture (for 
it is nothing else) which derives the race from Eastern Asia.” I 
venture on the contrary to assert that there is no philologist worthy 
of the name who, having carefully studied the languages of the New 
World and the Old with which this paper deals, has come to any 
other conclusion than that reached by Dr. Latham and myself. And 
if Mr. Hale will simpiy follow up the relations of the Basque, which 
he wisely connects with our American aboriginal languages, he will 
soon find himself among those very peoples of Eastern Asia whom he 
so summarily dismisses. Dr. Latham’s Peninsular Mongolidae, in- 
cluding the Yeniseians, and the Americans, are neither Mongolic, 
Tungusic, (with the exception of the Tinneh , Finno-Samoyedic, Dra- 
vidian, or Monosyllabic. They have relations in India among the 
aboriginal northern peoples, and the Kadun or red Kariens of Bir- 
mah belong to the same race. But, with these exceptions, the Khitan 
do not connect with the Asiatic populations. Not till we reach the 
confines of Europe and Asia in the Caucasus, where another unclassi- 
fied group of languages makes its appearance, do we find the relatives 
