414 SUPPOSED PREVALENCE OF ONE CRANIAL TYPE 



back to a vastly remote, if not incalculable era of unrecorded 

 time." 



Such being some of the very important and comprehensive deduc- 

 tions now based on the premises originally advanced by Dr. Morton, 

 it becomes of some interest to the Ethnologist to ascertain if these 

 premises are so surely established as to be beyond all question. 

 That some of the assumed evidence of this all-pervading conformity 

 has been adopted on insufficient data, is manifest from the prema- 

 ture generalizations in relation to the holophrastic or polysynthetic 

 character affirmed to pertain to all the languages and dialects of 

 America, and assumed to supply the place of that grammatical unity 

 of structure in the Indo-European languages, the establishment of 

 which has led to such important results. 



The dialects of the numerous families of American tongues multi- 

 ply with the labors of their investigators. Duponceau, writing in 

 1822, numbered them as one thousand two hundred and fourteen. 

 Scarcely any trace of the roots of a common vocabulary help in the 

 comparison of many of these diverse languages of the New World. 

 Of some of the indigenous tongues even now spoken around the 

 Rios and Colorado, and in more southern latitudes, the holophrastic 

 attribute is rather assumed than known ; and in more than one 

 group, of which the Carib is an illustration, languages are found in 

 nearly the lowest stages of undeveloped simplicity. Nevertheless, 

 this holophrastic or polysynthetical mode of condensing a group of 

 words into one abreviated term susceptible of further modification, 

 and of inflexion, is well worthy of the interest it has excited. This 

 distinguishing trait, or " plan of thought of the American languages," 

 as Dr. Lieber has designated it, has yet to be applied as a philologi- 

 cal test to many untried tongues and dialects of the new continents ; 

 but meanwhile some of the most comprehensive generalizations 

 based on it seem to have been advanced in the inverse ratio of the 

 linguistic knowledge of their advocates. Those most fitted to pro- 

 nounce on the subject— as Duponceau, in his later writings, and Gal- 

 latin — most cautiously avoid general conclusions, such as the former 

 was tempted to by earlier and less complete observations ; and, as in 

 many other inquiries, extended knowledge tends at present to com- 

 plicate the question, instead of confirming the seductive theory of 

 Duponceau, of a common philological character pervading the lan- 

 guages of America from Greenland to Cape Horn. 



The extreme interest which attaches to the investigation of the 

 distinguishing traits already recognized as pertaining to the languages 



