ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
a relationship between two or more races. Nor, indeed, 
can one trust absolutely to the resemblance in the rudi¬ 
mentary ornamentation of articles of use. If you happen 
to be a student of languages, and have studied dozens of 
them, you will soon discover how words will travel across 
entire continents. They can often be traced back to their 
origin by the knowledge of intermediate languages 
through which, with distortions, those words have passed. 
In Central Africa I actually heard words of Mongolian 
origin, and not only that, but even traced Mongolian 
characteristics in the type of the ruling classes of natives, 
as well as in the construction of their language. 
It is easy to be occasionally misled. I remember on 
my journey across Africa how amazed I was at first at 
hearing some Tonkinese expressions used by the native 
cannibals. I really could not get over my amazement until 
I learnt that some years previously a number of Tonkinese 
convicts had been sent up the Congo and Ubanghi rivers 
by the French. Several of them had lived in that particu¬ 
lar village of cannibals for some years. Hence the 
adoption of certain words which had remained in frequent 
use, whereas the Tonkinese individuals had disappeared. 
I took special care in Brazil, when making a vocabu¬ 
lary of the Bororo and other Indian languages, to select 
words which I ascertained were purely Indian and had 
not been contaminated by either imported Portuguese 
words or words from any other language. I was much 
struck by the extraordinary resemblance of many words 
in the language of the Indians of Central Brazil to the 
Malay language and to languages of Malay origin, which 
I had learnt in the Philippine Islands and the Sulu 
Archipelago. 
For instance: the Sun, which is called in Malay 
mata-ari, usually abbreviated into J ari, was in the Bororo 
language metiri, and in the language of the Apiacar In¬ 
dians of the Arinos-Juruena river, ahra, which indeed 
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