1 6 ETHNO-BOTANY OF THE CO AH VILLA INDIANS 



northern Mexico, found such existing in four widely used Mexican 

 tongues the Cora, the Tepehuana, the Tarahumari, and the Cahita. 

 These comprise what Buschrnann calls his " Sonoran linguistc family" 

 (sonorische Sprachstdmme). The connection of these languages in the 

 past with the Aztec is now, I believe, generally accepted. Continuing 

 his investigations into the languages of the southwest United States, 

 Buschmann discovered similar traces, arguing for an earlier common 

 speech from which all could be descended, in all members of the 

 Shoshone linguistic family. 1 The results of these labors are stated by 

 Dr. Brinton as follows : 



The relationship of these numerous bands is unquestionable, although 

 many of them have freely adopted words from other stocks. The principal 

 members of this stock are the Utes, Shoshones, and Comanches in the north; 

 various tribes in Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango in the center ; 

 and the Nahuas, or Aztecs, in the south. It is not to be understood that any 

 one of these derived its idioms from the other, but rather that at some remote 

 epoch all three were offshoots from one ancestral stem. 2 



Buschmann's first essay on the languages of southern California 

 was a study of the two vocabularies furnished by Horatio Hale, the 

 Kizh (of San Gabriel), and the Netela (of San Juan Capistrano), and 

 was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences of 

 Berlin for the year i855- 3 In these two vocabularies from the Pacific 

 coast Buschmann recognized evidences of the widespread aztekischen 

 Sprache, which he was so zealously tracing from the Mexican highland 

 northward through Mexico to the great American desert of the south- 

 western United States. 



Bei der genugsam von mir aufgezeigten Gemeinschaft der zwei califor- 

 nischen Idiome, so lautet mein Urtheil, hofft man auch hier vergebens auf 

 ein genaues, gliickliches Zutreffen eigenthiimlichen Formen dieser Sprachen 

 mit dem Comanche und Shoshonischen oder mit dem siidlichenen sonorische 

 Hauptsprachen, ein Zusammentreffen mit etwas recht Besonderen einer 

 Sprache mit einer anderen ; so nahe liegen die Sprachen sich nie, die sind 

 alle fremd genug gegen einander/ 



Buschmann's final work is the remarkable essay published four 

 years after the above in the Royal Academy's Proceedings : " Traces of 



i Major Powell does not seem to consider this evidence sufficient to support either Buschmann's or 

 Brinton's conclusions as to an earlier common stock. 



?The American Race, p. 118. New York, 1891. 



3 Die Sprachen Kizh und Netela von Neu California. Abhandlungen der Koniglichen Aka- 

 demie der Wissensehaften zu Berlin, 1855. 

 id., p. 318. 



