IN THE KHITAN LANGUAGES. 287 
Aztecs and the Lencas; and in the south, the Muyscas of New 
Granada, the Quichas, Aymaras, Atacamenos, Sapibocones and 
Cayubabas of Peru, and the Chileno family, embracing the Chilians, 
Pampas Indians, Patagonians and Fuegians. The Dacotah, Huron- 
Troquois, Choctaw, Shoshonese, Pujuni, Yuma, Pueblos, Sonora and 
Lenca divisions comprise many dialects, and, as I propose to treat 
the Chileno division as one under the name Araucanian, the same 
will be true concerning it. The dialectic differences of the Basque 
are few, as are those of the Circassian and Mizjeji, but the Georgian 
has four dialects, and the Lesghian at least ten. The Yeniseian, 
Koriak, Kamchatdale, and Aino divisions each present tribal and 
dialectic differences, and the language of the Loo Choo Islands pro- 
vides a complement to that of Japan. These dialectic differences 
are valuable as furnishing the laws of phonetic change within the 
bounds of a single language, and as aiding in the application of simi- 
lar laws to forms of speech widely separated geographically. 
Instead of setting forth in this paper the whole of my compara- 
tive vocabulary of over 150 words in the various languages and 
dialects of the Khitan family, which would be more likely to con- 
fuse than to convince, I prefer for the present to restrict myself to 
an exhibition of some of the relations of one sucb language to its 
connected forms of speech. The language selected is the Huron- 
Troquois in its various dialects, the Huron, Tuscarora, Nottoway, 
Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, &c. This is one of the 
most peculiar and difficult members of the family, differing from all 
the others known to me in this particular, that no one of its dialects 
possesses the labials 6, p, v, f; or the liquid and labial m. The 
nearest approach they can make to a labial sound is w, and where 
m cannot be similarly represented it must be replaced by another 
liquid, m. With the Huron-Iroquois language I compare first of all 
that member of the family which, following the line of Khitan 
migration backwards, is the most remote from it, namely the Basque 
of northern Spain and south-western France. Grammatically the 
two languages agree, for it has been rightly said that the Basque is the 
most American of the Old World tongues known to philology. A better 
acquaintance than is at present possessed of the languages of north- 
eastern Asia would doubtless modify such a statement. Still it is well 
to be on aright footing with the grammarians, although one of them, 
M. Vinson, a distinguished Basque scholar, who, some time ago, pub- 
