diversified field of study scarcely yet fairly entered upon; while their peculiar complexities, when considered in relation to nations broken up into numerous unlettered and nomade tribes, and with no predominant central nationality, seem to afford such facilities for everchanging combinations, that the difficulty of determining their radical elements is greatly increased in any attempt to compare their old and modern forms. Two languages, however, seem to invite special study, in addition to that of Mexico. The Maya, which presents striking contrasts to it in its soft, vocalic forms, has already been referred to as that to which we are attracted by some apparent relations to the remarkable antiquities, and the possible surviving civilisation, of Central America; while the Quichua was the classical language of South America, the richly-varied and comprehensive tongue, wherein, according to its older historians, the poets of Peru incorporated the national legends, and which the Incas vainly strove to make not only the Court language, but the medium of all official intercourse, and the common speech of their extended empire.

From some one of the early centres of South American population, planted on the Pacific coasts by Polynesian or other migration, and nursed in the neighbouring valleys of the Andes in remote prehistoric times, the predominant southern race diffused itself, or extended its influence through many ramifications. It spread northward beyond the Isthmus, expanded throughout the peninsular region of Central America, and after occupying for a time the Mexican plateau, it overflowed along either side of the great mountain chain, reaching towards the northern latitudes of the Pacific, and extending inland to the east of the Rocky Mountains, through the great valley watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries. It must not, however, be supposed that

such a hypothesis of migration implies the literal dif fusion of a single people from one geographical centre. I should no more think of designating either the Toltees or the Mound Builders Peruvians, than of calling the Iranian Indo-Germans Greeks. But many archaeological traces seem to indicate just such affinities between the former as have been suggested by the philological relations of the latter.

Thus far we have chiefly regarded the traces of oceanic migration by the southern Pacific route; but while its island groups appear to furnish facilities for such a transfer of population to the New World as evidence of various kinds tends to confirm, it seems scarcely to admit of doubt that the Canary Islands were known to the ancients, and that by Madeira and the Azores, on the one hand, and by the Cape Verde Islands, on the other, the Antilles and Brazil may have become centres of diverse ethnological elements, and also of distinctive arts and customs of the western hemisphere. The Carib race, which was the predominant one in the Lesser Antilles, and occupied extensive regions of the mainland toward the southern Atlantic seaboard, differed very strikingly, alike in mental and physical characteristies, from the races of Central and of North America, and still more so from those with whom they came in contact in the larger islands. Traces of words common to the Colfachi of Florida and the insular Caribs are probably the sole grounds for the tradition of a North American origin for the latter; though in cranial conformation their analogies are with the northern dolichocephalic nations. Greatly more interesting is the fact that, while their continental habitat belongs to the southern and not to the northern hemisphere, they also disclose Polynesian affinities in language and customs Dr. Latham remarks in his Varieties of Man: "In the

ethnography of Polynesia certain peculiar customs in respect to the language of caste and ceremony were noted. The Carib has long been known to exhibit a remarkable peculiarity in this respect. The current statement is that the women have one language and the men another. The real fact is less extraordinary. Certain objects have two names; one of which is applied by males, the other by females only." The explanation offered attempts to trace the female terms to the language of the Arawaks, the older inhabitants of the islands, the males among whom are assumed to have been exterminated, and the women adopted by the conquering Caribs as wives. But such an admixture of races has occurred in every age of the world, with no such results; and the theory very unsatisfactorily accounts for a philological phenomenon by no means limited to the Carib among the languages of America. In our modern English language grammatical gender has to a great extent disappeared; in the ancient Saxon, as in the Latin, it affected noun, pronoun, and adjective, and modified them through all their declensions; in the peculiar laws thus found as an analogous feature of Polynesian and South American languages, gender is carried to the utmost extent, and not only modifies the forms of speech applicable to the sexes, but those in use by them. It is in this direction that the peculiarities analogous to true gender have been developed in widely different American languages. The general mode of expressing sex for the lower animals, alike among the northern Indians, and in the languages of Mexico and Central America, is only by prefixing another noun to their names, equivalent to our "male" and "female," or "he" and "she." But the use of distinct terms expressive of difference of sex in the human species is carried to an extent unknown in ancient or modern European

languages; and separate adjectives are employed to express qualities, such as size, form, proportion, etc., from those which define the same attributes of inanimate objects, and even of the lower animals. In closing his analysis of the Huasteca language, along with others spoken in Central America, Gallatin remarks on an abbreviated mode of speech noted by Father Tapia Zenteno as in use by the women, and adds, "Here, as amongst all the other Indian nations, the names by which they express the various degrees of kindred differ from those used by men."

The cranial affinities of the Caribs have already been referred to. They are essentially dolichocephalic; and the predominance of such configuration throughout the American Archipelago has been made the basis of important ethnological deductions. Retzius especially has recorded the opinion that, while he conceives the Tongusian skull to form a clearly recognised link between those of the Chinese and the Esquimaux; the other primitive dolichocephalae of America are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the populations of Africa, comprised by Dr. Latham under subdivisions of his Atlantida. The migrations which such affinities would indicate have already been referred to as altogether consistent with the probabilities suggested by the course of ancient navigation; and if early Mediterranean voyagers found the Antilles uninhabited, the genial climate and abundant natural resources of those islands peculiarly adapted them as nurseries of such germs of colonization for the neighbouring continent.

But independent of all real or hypothetical ramifications from southern or insular offsets of oceanic migration, many analogies confirm the probability of some portion of the North American stock having entered the

continent from Asia by Behring Straits or the Aleutian Islands; and more probably by the latter than the former, for it is the climate that constitutes the real barrier. The intervening sea is no impediment. In a southern latitude, such a narrow passage as Behring Straits would have been little more interruption to migration than the Bosporus between Asia and Europe; and in its own latitude it is annually bridged by the very power that guards it from common use as a highway of the nations, and is thus placed within easy command of any Samoyed or Kamtchatkan sleighing party. It is, indeed, a well-authenticated fact, that the Russians had learned from native Siberians of a great continent lying to the east of Kamtchatka, long before Vitus Behring demonstrated that the western and eastern hemispheres so nearly approached, that the grand triumph of Columbus could be performed by the rudest Namollo in his frail canoe.

By such a route, then, a North American germ of population may have entered the continent from Asia, diffused itself over the North-west, and ultimately reached the valleys of the Mississippi, and penetrated to southern latitudes by a route to the east of the Rocky Mountains. Many centuries may have intervened between their first immigration, and their coming in contact with the races of the southern continent; and philological and other evidence indicates that if such a north-western immigration be really demonstrable, it is also one of very ancient date. But so far as I have been able to study such evidence, much of that hitherto adduced appears to point the other way; and while, theoretically, the northern passage seems so easy, yet so far as any direct proof goes, the Polynesian entrance into the south, across the wide barrier of the Pacific, is the one most readily sustained.