August 27, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



193 



to disguise the resemblance indicating the common 

 origin of such dialect-languages. But there is 

 another mode in which the spread of population 

 might take place, that would lead in this respect to 

 a very different result. If a single pair, man and 

 wife, should wander off into an uninhabited re- 

 gion, and there, after a few years, both perish, 

 leaving a famQy of young children to grow up by 

 themselves and frame their own speech, the facts 

 which have been adduced will show that this 

 speech might, and probably would, be an entirely 

 novel language. Its inflections would certainly 

 be different from those of the parent tongue, be- 

 cause the speech of children under five years of 

 age has commonly no inflections. The great mass 

 of vocables, also, would probably be new. The 

 strong language-making instinct of the younger 

 children would be sufficient to overpower any 

 feeble memory which their older companions 

 might retain of the parental idiom. The baby- 

 talk, the ' children's language,' would become the 

 mother-tongue of the new community, and of the 

 nation that would spring from it. 



Those who are familiar with the habits of the 

 lumting tribes of America know how common it 

 is for single families to wander off from the main 

 band in this manner, — sometimes following the 

 game, sometimes exiled for offences against the 

 tribal law, sometimes impelled by the all-powerful 

 passion of love, when the man and woman belong 

 to families or clans at deadly feud, or forbidden 

 to intermarry. In these latter cases, the object of 

 the fugitives would be to place as wide a space as 

 possible between themselves and their irate kin- 

 dred. In modern times, when the whole country 

 is occupied, their flight would merely carry them 

 into the territory of another tribe, among whom, 

 if well received, they would quickly be absorbed. 

 But in the primitive period, when a vast uninhab- 

 ited region stretched before them, it would be 

 easy for them to find some sheltered nook or 

 fruitful valley, in which they might hope to re- 

 main secure, and rear their young brood unmo- 

 lested by human neighbors. 



If, under such circumstances, disease or the 

 casualties of a hunter's life should carry off the 

 parents, the survival of the children would, it is 

 evident, depend mainly upon the nature of the 

 climate and the ease with which food could be 

 procured at all seasons of the year. In ancient 

 Europe, after the present climatal conditions were 

 established, it is doubtful if a family of children 

 under ten years of age could have lived through a 

 single winter. We are not, therefore, surprised 

 to find that no more than four or five linguistic 

 stocks are represented in Europe, and that most 

 of these are believed to have been of comparatively 



late introduction. In California, on the other 

 hand, where the climate is mild and equable be- 

 yond example, and where small fruits, roots, and 

 other esculents, abound at all seasons of the year, 

 the aborigines are found to speak languages belong- 

 ing to no less than nineteen distinct stocks. In Bra- 

 zil, where the same conditions prevail, more than 

 a hundred stocks, lexically distinct, have been 

 found to exist. A review of other linguistic prov- 

 inces yields results which strongly confirm the 

 views now presented. A curious ethnological fact 

 which tends in the same direction is the circum- 

 stance, which has been noticed by Major Powell, 

 that, as a general thing, each linguistic family has 

 its own mythology. Of course, when the childish 

 pair or group, in their isolated abode, framed their 

 new language and transmitted it to their descend- 

 ants, they must necessarily at the same time have 

 framed a new religion for themselves and their 

 posterity ; for the religious instinct, like the lan- 

 guage-making faculty, is a part of the mental out- 

 fit of the human race. 



But we are now brought face to face with 

 another problem of great difficulty. The view 

 which has just been presented shows that all the 

 vast variety of languages on earth may have arisen 

 within a comparatively brief period ; and many 

 facts seem to show that the peopling of the globe 

 by the present nations and tribes of men is a quite 

 recent event. The traditions of the natives of 

 America, North and South, have been gathered 

 and studied of late years, by scientific inquirers, 

 with great care and valuable results. All these 

 traditions, Eskimo, Algonkin, Iroquois, Choctaw, 

 Mexican, Maya, Chibcha, Peruvian, represent the 

 people who preserved them as new-comers in the 

 regions in which they were found by the whites. 

 Ethnologists aee aware that there is not a tradition, 

 a monument, or a relic of any kind, on this con- 

 tinent, which requii-es us to carry back the history 

 of any of its aboriginal tribes, of the existing race, 

 for a period of three thousand years. In the 

 Pacific Islands the recent investigations have had 

 a still more striking and definite result. We know, 

 on sufficiently clear evidence, the times when 

 most of the groups, from New Zealand to the 

 Sandwich Islands, were first settled by their Poly- 

 nesian occupants. None of the dates go back 

 beyond the Christian era. Some of them come 

 down to the last century. In Australia, the able 

 missionary investigators have ascertained that 

 the natives had a distinct tradition of the arrival 

 of their ancestors, who entered by the north-west 

 coast. It is most unlikely that, among such a 

 barbarous and wandering race, a tradition of this 

 nature should be more than two thousand years 

 old. Probably it is much less ancient. We know 



