362 



digious length, constructed of stone or earth, in the United 

 States, denote the existence of populous towns, or of forti- 

 fied camps and places at the confluence of great rivers. 

 Notwithstanding the illusions of Raleigh and Keymis, no 

 traces have hitherto been discovered in Guyana of an edi- 

 fice in stone. Had the nations of the Oroonoko remained 

 abandoned to themselves, the civilization of Peru and the 

 table-land of New Grenada, and that of the empires of the 

 Inca and the Zaque would have penetrated towards the east, 

 following the course of the Caqueta, the Rio Negro, and the 

 Meta (Vol. v, 809, 838, 839.) 3 but this movement of 

 native cultivation would have been slower than that of 

 foreign. 



I am not ignorant that languages which have no litera- 

 ture are pretty generally considered with disdain ; (inculti 

 sermonis horrorem) those sounds appear to us but the 

 wild cry of nature, because our ear is not formed to seize 

 the gradations j but we must not forget that there is ano- 

 ther view in which languages should be studied than that 

 of collecting the individualities of a foreign literature. 



The most uncultivated tongues are interesting with respect 

 to their structure and interior organization. The botanist 

 scarcely gives any preference to the plants which can be em- 

 ployed usefully in the arts, or which augment national 

 wealthy he seeks to analyse all the forms of the vegetable king- 

 dom, because to apprehend properly the organization of one, 

 he must know them all. In the same manner, we cannot re- 

 duce the tongues into families, without studying a great num- 

 ber of those that differ in their grammatical structure. If the 

 multiplicity of languages existing on a small space, opposes 

 great obstacles to the communication of different tribes, it 

 gives them the advantage of preserving a character of indi- 

 viduality, without which all that belongs to national physi- 

 ognomy is effaced. Besides, and 1 dwell with pleasure on 

 this circumstance, none of the American tongues are in that 



