SSAJOIATICAIi CONSl'HFCTIOS'. 
325 
vague notions of the Semitic languages. Did motives sup- 
posed to be favourable to religiou, give rise to this extraor- 
dinary theory ? In the north of America, among the Choc- 
taws and the Chickasaws, travellers somewhat credulous have 
heard the strains of the Hallelujah* of the Hebrews; as, 
according to the Pundits, the three sacred words of the 
mysteries of the Eleusisf (Jeonx on pax) resound still in the 
Indies. I do not mean to suggest, that the nations of Latin 
Europe may have called whatever has a foreign physiognomy 
Hebrew or Biscayan, as lor a long time all those monuments 
were called Egyptian, which were not in the Grecian or 
Roman style. I am rather disposed to think that the gram- 
matical system of the American idioms has confirmed the 
missionaries of the sixteenth century in their ideas respect- 
ing the Asiatic origin of the nations of the New World. 
The tedious compilation of Father Garcia, Tratado del Origen 
de los Indios.% is a proof of this. The position of the pos- 
sessive and personal pronouns at the end of the uoun and 
the verb, as well as the numerous tenses of the latter, cha- 
racterize the Hebrew and the other Semitic languages. Some 
of the missionaries were struck at finding the same peculiari- 
ties in the American tongues : they did uot reflect, that the 
analogy of a few scattered features does not prove languages 
to belong to the same stock. 
It appears less astonishing, that men, who are well 
acquainted with only two languages extremely heteroge- 
neous, the Castilian and the Biscayan, should have found in 
the latter a family resemblance to the American languages. 
The composition of words, the facility with which the partial 
elements are detected, the forms of the verbs, aud their dif- 
ferent modifications, may have caused and kept up this illu- 
sion. But we repeat, an equal tendency towards aggregation 
or incorporation does not constitute an identity of origin. 
The following are examples of the relations between the 
American and Biscayan languages ; idioms totally different 
in their roots. 
In Chavma, quenpotupra quoguaz, ‘I do not know,’ pro- 
perly, ‘ knowing not 1 am.’ In Tamanac, jarer-uac-ure, 
* L’Escarbot, Charlevoix, and even Adair (Hist, of the American 
Indians, 1775). 
+ Asiat. Res., vol. v. Ouvaroff on the Eleusinian Mysteries, 1816. 
J Treatise on the Origin of the Indians. 
