IN THE KHITAN LANGUAGES. 295 



unless we are disposed to admit the prior claims of the Circassian 

 sheelday or the Georgian kalaki. 



Nothing can prove more convincingly the wonderful vitality of 

 words even among peoples devoid of literature than the comparison 

 just instituted between the Basque and the Iroquois. If it be 

 allowed that the separation of the two stocks only took place at the 

 time when the Hittite empire was overthrown by the Assyrian 

 Sargon, for certainly it can be placed at no later period, then it fol- 

 lows that 2,600 years have passed since the ancestoi's of the Vascones 

 and those of our Hurons and Iroquois mingled their voices on the 

 banks of the Euphrates. But if, as is far more probable, the Basques 

 reached their Spanish home by way of Northern Africa, this journey 

 must have been undertaken long centuries before, when that Shepherd 

 tide of conquest, in which the Kheti formed a mighty wave, was 

 driven back upon the desert sands and the Mediterranean shore by 

 the great Egyptian Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty. When Moses 

 was still a child, and the ancient Hebrew language had not yet 

 assumed a literary form, the Khitan wanderers carried their imperish- 

 able speech across the Libyan sands to plant it at last in the remotest 

 bound of the European continent. 



Even now we hear much of the Atlantis theory, of the population 

 of America from Western Europe and Africa by means of a sub- 

 merged continent, or by such brave sea daring as brought Columbus 

 to the New World, and the very connection of the Basque and 

 Iroquois languages tempts the question : May there not be truth in 

 such a theory 1 But language, which has established the relationship 

 of the peoples, refutes the theory. Our Huron-Iroquois came not 

 to the east first but to the west, not to the south but to the north. 

 Their features, their religion, their character and customs are dis- 

 tinctively Koriak, and their appearance upon the stage of American 

 history began at a time when, had Biscay or Morocco been their 

 starting point, they must have brought with them some traces at 

 least of mediaeval culture. Euskara and Basque, names of a people 

 only in Spain, are to the Iroquois Tawiscara and Jo-uskeha, gods or 

 divine ancestors of the race, whose memory has vanished long years 

 ago from Guipuzcoa and Navarre. The Basque is a seaman, but 

 some other race than his own, that of his mother, it may be, who 

 gave the European tint to his dusky complexion, must have taught 

 him to hold the sail and brave the dangers of the ocean, for the 



