16 AFFILIATION OF THE ALGONQUIN LANGUAGES. 
sented by the Chinese, have been added. But these do not exhaust 
the systems of the Eastern hemisphere. Wild as have been the 
statements made regarding the construction of languages, they have 
not equalled in folly the hasty utterances on the subject of their 
vocabularies. Messrs. Rivero and Tschudi, in their work on Peruvian 
Antiquities, write as follows: “The analogy so much relied on between 
the words of the American languages and those of the ancient con- 
tinent have induced us to make an approximate estimate, as far as 
our means would permit, of the numerical value of the idioms of both 
hemispheres ; and the result was that, from between eight and nine 
thousand American words, one only could be found analogous in sense 
and sound to a word of any idiom of the ancient continent.” It is 
evident that these gentlemen, who deserve well for their services to 
ethnological science, never consulted even the imperfect lists of the 
Mithridates, and pursued their researches within such a narrow field 
as to falsify the doctrine of chances itself. Mr. Hubert H. Bancroft, 
to whom we owe a work of great value, “The Native Races of the 
Pacific States,” allows himself to be led away to somewhat similar 
conclusions ; but as he furnishes us with a list of so-called Darien 
numerals which are almost pure Gaelic, without noticing the pheno- 
menon, it is to be presumed that, while a diligent and successful 
collector, Mr. Bancroft is no philologist. 
Turning from philological to physical ethnology, we find that all 
the American families have been called Mongolian, and that nearly 
all attempts to affiliate the tribes of the Northern Continent have led 
inquirers to the Mongolian area in Eastern Asia. Even Dr. Latham, 
than whom there is no better authority on this subject, terms his 
large American class, American Mongolide. Yet, after stating that 
the Esquimaux are essentially Mongols, he adds: “On the other 
hand, in his most typical form, the American Indian is not Mongol 
in physiognomy. With the same black straight hair, he has an 
aquiline nose, a prominent profile, and a skin more red or copper- 
coloured than either yellow or brown. Putting this along with other 
marked characteristics, moral as well as physical, it is not surprising 
that the American should have been taken as the type and sample of 
a variety in contrast with the Mongolian.” 
It is not my intention in this paper to deal in a loose and general 
manner with the subject of American ethnology, but to.confine myself 
to the connections of a single but large family of the aborigines of 
