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 (novem^ in Sanscrit nava)^ and neuf^ new 
(novusy in Sanscrit, nava) ; acht, in German, 
eight, and achtung^ esteem ; six, and |g, the 
preposition ; hosa^ in Chibcha, two, and 
bosa, the preposition j^or. In the same manner 
