904 



RBPOBT — 1884. 



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feature approximate to the Mongoloid typo of North Asia ; but when it comes to 

 cranial measurement, tlie Esquimaux with their narrower situlls, whose proportion 

 of breadth to leuj^tii is only 76 to 80, are far from conforming? to the Iiroad-sItuUcd 

 type of North Asiatic Mongoloids, whose average index is toward 85. Of tiiis diver- 

 gence I have no explanation to otter; it illustrates the diliieulties wliich have to be 

 met by a young and imperfect science. 



To clear tlie obscurity of race-])robIems, as viewed from the anatomical staiidiiiff 

 point, we naturally seek the help of language. Of late years the anthropoiot'y of 

 the Old World has had ever-increasing help from comparative piiilology. In such 

 investigations, when the pliilologist seeks a connection between tlie languages of 

 distant regions, he endeavours to establisii Ijotli a common stock of words and a 

 common grammatical structure. For instance, this most perfect proof of connec- 

 tion has been lately adduced by Mr. li. H. Codrington in support of tlie view timt 

 the ISIelanesians and Polynesians, much as they diller in skin and iiair, speak lan- 

 guages whicli belong to a common .stock. A more adventurous theory is that of 

 jjcnormant and Sayce, tiiat tlie old Chaldean language is connected witii the 

 Tatar group ; yet even here there is an a priori case based at once on analogies of 

 dictionary and grammar, 'i'he comparative metjiod becomes much weaker when 

 few or no wordscan be claimed us similar, and the whole biu-den of proof li;i< to be 

 borne by similar modes of word-formation and syntax, as, for example, in the re- 

 searches of Aymonier and Keane tending to trace the Malay group of languages into 

 connection with the Khmer or Cambodian. Within America the philologist use,s 

 with success the strong method of combined dictionary ar.d grammar in order to 

 dehne his great language-groups, such as the Algonquin extending from Hudson's 

 Bay to Virginia, the Athapascan from Hudson's liay to New Mexico, liotli crossing 

 Canada in tiieir vast range. But attempts to trace analogies between lists of 

 words in Asiatic and American langunges, though they may have shown some 

 similarities deserving further inquiry, have hardly proved an amount of corre- 

 spondence beyond what chance coincidence would be capable of producing. Thus 

 when it comes to judging of allinities between tin- great American language-families, 

 or of any of them with the Asiatic, there is only the weaker method of structure 

 to fall back on. Here the I'lsquimaux analogy seems to be witli North Asiatic 

 languages. It would lie defined as agglutinative-siillixiiig, or, to put the definition 

 practically, an Esquimaux word of however portentous length is treated by looking 

 out in the dictionary the first syllable or two, which will bo the root, the rest 

 being a string of modifying suffixes. The Esquimaux thus presents in an exaggerated 

 form the characteristic structure of the vast I' ral- Altaic or Turanian group of 

 Asiatic languages. In studying American langunges as a whole, the first step is to 

 discard the generalisation of Dunonceau as to the American languages from Green- 

 land to (-'ape Horn being nnited together, and distinguished from those of other 

 parts of the world, by a common character of polysynthetism, or combining whole 

 sentences into words. The real divergences of structure in American language- 

 families are brought clearly into view in the two dissertations of Mons. Lucien 

 Adam, which are the most valuable papers of the Congres International des 

 Americanistes. Making special examination of sixteen languages of Nortli and 

 South America, Adam considers these to belong to a number of independent or 

 irreducible families, as tht-y would have been, he says, ' had there been primitively 

 several human couples.' It may be worth suggesting, however, that the task of 

 the philologer is to exhaust every possibility of discovering connections between 

 languages before falling back on the extreme hypothesis of indt^iendent origins. 

 These American languag-e-families have grammatical tendencies in common, which 

 suggest original relationship, and in some of these ev^-n correspond with languages 

 of other regions in a way which may indicate connection rather tiian chance. 

 For instance, the distinction of gender, not by sex as male and female, but by 

 life as animate and inanimate, is familiar in the Algonquin group; in Cree 

 muskesin=»\\Q6 (mocassin) makes its ])lural mu.tkrsiud, while eskwaj/il = yvoman 

 (squaw) makes its plural eskioaytcuh. Now, this kind of gender is not peculiar to 

 America, but appears in South-East Asia, as for instance in the Kol languages of 

 Bengal. In that Asiatic district also appears the habit of infixing, that is, of 



