134 
THE AMAZON AND MADEIRA RIVERS. 
and this must bo regai'ded as one of the principal causes of the infinite 
number of languages and dialects in the New World; which, in their 
turn, were additional serious drawbacks to general progress. Languages 
which have not been reduced to writing must change rapidly. Even the 
bodily peculiarities of different families, the shape of their lips, &c., will 
suffice to form an idiom, differing materially from the original one ;* and 
such changes must have eontributed to keep the separated hordes asimder, 
especially as the princij)le adopted by all iicople living in a state of 
natm-e seems to be ; whoever does not speak my language is my foe. 
Their division into so many hundreds of tribes and hordes, and 
the gi-eat number of their languages and idioms, made Martins, the 
learned explorer of Brazil, think that the state of the autochthons 
of America, though a primitive, is not their original one ; that they 
are not a wild but a degenerate race, the degraded relics of a more 
perfect past, whose dissolution had begun thousands of years before the 
Conquest. 
There is no doubt that this pirocess has, since then, been accelerated 
by bloody wars and persecutions, reduction of their hunting-grounds, 
contagious diseases, and want of physical and moral comforts; but I 
do not believe there is any reason to date this decay from pre-historic 
times. When the hordes of Spanish adventurers destroyed the realm 
of the Incas, they found a prosperous and improving country; and 
their proud temples, as Martius ui'gcs in further proof, were by no means 
in ruins then. In additional support of Iris hypothesis, he points to the 
remains of hierarchical and monarchical institutions among all, even 
the most' savage tribes, and the state of many of their plants, which 
nowadays are not foimd anywhere growing wild. But might not these 
vestiges of institutions be the beginnings as well as the remains of 
a civilisation? And might not nations standing on a very low level 
^ A vory clever and le<irned monk of the Order of St. Benedict, Erei CamiRo de 
Monserrato, custodian of the National Library at Rio de Janeiro up to the time of his 
death recently, and who, in his long voyages on the West coast of America, had had 
ample opportunities for comparative study of Indian languages, expressed himself in 
a conversation with me, to the effect that everything in this respetjt was to be accounted 
for by natural and material reasons; and that he was sure that “el,” for instance, a 
final .sjdlable recurring very frequently in the Mexican language, had arisen from the 
custom of the old Mexicans of pricking their tongues, in a sort of religious frenzy, with 
the long thorns of a largo cactus, so that this organ was eontiiiuaUy affected witli 
many of them, and caused them to lisp and stammer, ultimately producing the strange 
syllable. 
