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barbarous people, unacquainted either with paper 

 or writing. The magney (agave americana) is 

 indigenous in both Americas ; yet it is only 

 among the people of the Azteck and Tolteck 

 race, that the use of paper was as well known as 

 it has been from the remotest times in China and 

 Japan. When we recollect what difficulty the 

 Greeks and Romans found to procure papyrus, 

 at a period even when literature was in its full 

 splendor, we almost regret seeing the materials 

 of paper so common among American nations, 

 who were ignorant of syllabic writing, and who 

 had only rude paintings, astrological reveries, 

 and the traces of an inhuman system of rites, to 

 transmit to posterity. 



If it be true, as Mr. Duquesne asserts, that in 

 the Chibcha idiom the words denoting the num- 

 bers have common roots with other words, which 

 indicate the phases of the Moon, or objects re- 

 lative to rural life, this fact would be one of the 

 most singular in the philosophical history of lan- 

 guages. We may conceive, that an accidental 

 resemblance of sounds is sometimes manifested 

 between numerical words, and things which 

 have no connection with numbers, as in neuf\ 

 nine fnovem, in Sanscrit navaj, and neuf new 

 (novus, in Sanscrit, nava ) ; acht, in German, 

 eight, and achtung, esteem ; Ig> six, and J£, the 

 preposition from ; bosa, in Chibcha, two, and 

 hosa, the preposition Jor. In the same manner 



