ASIATIC TRIBES OF NORTH AMERICA. 189 



and the Ayraara and Quichua of the Southern Continent ; and, 

 intermediate between the Asiatic and American divisions, the 

 Peninsular languages of Asia will occupy an important position. 

 The Altaic languages least in sympathy with this family are the 

 Mongol, whose affinities are largely Dravidian. At the base of this 

 large family the Accad stands, whose relations ai-e probably more 

 Peninsular than anything else ; and next to the Accad in point of 

 antiquity and philological importance is the pre- Aryan Celtic, which 

 lives in the Quichua of to-day, as I showed in a contribution to the 

 Society Americaine de France, and in a list published by Dr. Hyde 

 Clarke in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. Dr. Hyde 

 Clarke had long before connected the Accad and the Quichua- Aymara, 

 and had linked the Houssa with the Basque. He has also directed 

 attention to Basque similarities in Japanese and Loo-Choo. Most 

 of the tribes composing this family were known to the ancients as 

 Scythians, so that the ancestors of our modern Iroquois may have 

 over-run Media and plundered the Temple of Yenus at Ascalon, 

 tantalized the army of Darius or talked with Herodotus in the 

 Crimea. Types of mankind, in a savage state, do not greatly change, 

 as may be seen by comparing the Tinneh or Algonquin tribes with the 

 Iroquois and Choctaw. Languages long retain their earliest forms, as 

 is apparent in the Japanese somots and Loo-Choo shimntzi, which 

 are just the old Accadian sumu c, samak, a book, that were spoken in 

 ancient Babylonia perhaps four thousand years ago. This continent 

 may yet furnish materials in philology and kindred departments to 

 lay side by side with the literary and art treasures of the ancient 

 seats of empire on the Euphrates and Tigris, by which to restore the 

 page of long-forgotten history. At any rate there is a path from the 

 Old World into the New by the Asiatic Continent, as well as by the 

 islands of the sea. Discouragements enough have been placed in the 

 scholar's way by one-sided minds and students of a single language or 

 science. It is time to treat them with the contempt that all narrow, 

 ness deserves, and to aim at making ethnology more than a state- 

 ment of unsolved problems. 



It would be well for all who hold the essential diversity of 

 American from other grammatical forms, to ponder the statement of 

 one, who, himself no mean philologist, has generally shown little 

 favour to any attempts that have been made to reconcile the Old 

 World and the ISTew in point of language. I allude to M. Lucien 



