[15] 
THE 
AFFILIATION OF THE ALGONQUIN 
LANGUAGHS. 
BY JOHN CAMPBELL, M.A., 
Professor of Church History, Presbyterian College, Montreal. 
One of the modern schools of philologists has not heeded the 
scholastic maxim concerning entia, but has shown itself ready to 
multiply origins indefinitely without cause. Catlin, the artist, who, 
however, was very far from being a philologist, saw no necessity for 
showing how the Americans came to America, or that they ever came 
there at all. And at a conference on American subjects, held some 
three years ago, the President of the Anthropological Society of Paris 
found a warm reception for the statement, that the true solution of 
the question concerning the peopling of America is that the Americans 
are neither Hindoos, nor Pheenicians, nor Chinese, nor Kuropeans— 
they are Americans. An exception has been almost universally made 
in favour of the Esquimaux families of the far north, whose relations, 
physical and linguistic, with the Aleutan islanders and the Asiatie 
Tehuktchi are too striking to permit denial. In order to maintain 
the independent origin of the American tribes, it has been found 
necessary to deny the existence of any true likeness between the 
languages of the Old World and those of the New. The peculiar 
agglutination or synthetical character of American grammar, which, 
from the Athabascan area of the north to the Fuegian in the south, 
presents innumerable shades and broad lines of difference, has been 
represented as without parallel on the Eastern continent. Yet there 
are synthetic languages in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the 
Islands of the Sea. At one time the Indo-European and Semitic 
grammars were the only systems compared with those of other families 
of speech. To these the Ural-Altaic, comprising the Ugrian of 
Europe and the Tartar-Mongolian of Asia, and the Monosyllabic, repre- 
