538 
SECOND REPORT— 1832 
tius, who some years ago visited South America, were struck 
by the great resemblance between the Chinese, in the form of 
their skulls and features, and the American tribes near Brazil. 
Many tribes in the Western World have flatter features, more 
approaching to the Mongolian, than the nations of North Ame¬ 
rica; and if we were to adhere to a classification founded entirely 
on the principle of physical peculiarities, it would be difficult 
to discover a precise line of discrimination by which all the na¬ 
tive tribes of Americans are to be distinguished from the group 
of nations which constitute Cuvier’s ‘ race Mangolique .’ If the 
triple division of skulls is maintained, those of the American 
nations must be referred to the Mongolian form. Here, then, 
we have a wide extension of this family, which thus comes to 
include a great assemblage of nations beyond the limits of Asia, 
whose languages, though multiplied, have some common cha¬ 
racters ; and it is worthy of notice that those common charac¬ 
ters are the very reverse of the peculiarities which, as above men¬ 
tioned, distinguish the Chinese and Indo-Chinese languages 
from all others. The latter are monosyllabic and hardly in¬ 
flected ; the American languages, as we have observed, abound 
in long polysyllables, and in their modes of inflection are refined 
and elaborate, admitting almost infinite variety of termination 
and change of structure. As a class of languages, they have 
obtained the distinguishing term poly synthetic. 
“ The Malays, a people whose original seat, or, as I would 
rather say, earliest known position, is in the island of Sumatra, 
and from whom were descended, as it appears, all the Polyne¬ 
sian tribes of the great Southern Ocean, associate themselves 
more nearly with this department of nations than any other; and 
if referrible to either of the three divisions, must be included in 
the Mongolian department The history of these tribes will pre¬ 
sent us with many physical phenomena very adverse to the fun¬ 
damental principle on which the tripartite division of races can 
alone be maintained. This principle is the assumption that all 
physical characters are permanent and immutable. Now we have 
reason to believe that some of the tribes of Polynesian islanders 
have deviated in a most remarkable manner from the physical 
character most generally prevalent in their stock. Individuals are 
seen among the natives of the Society Islands of fair and sanguine 
complexion, and the Marquesans are among the finest races of 
men existing; their skulls have the oval, or, as it is termed, Cau¬ 
casian form. We thus find that the division of mankind, termed 
the Mongolian race, includes several groups or classes of nations 
distinguished by the most permanent and indelible characters, 
which are known to separate the great families of the human 
race from each other. They are associated by no common cir- 
