16 AFFILIATION OF THE ALGONQUIN LANGUAGES. 



Bented by the Chinese, hare 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 Techudi, 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 afiiliate 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 Mongolidse. 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 



