producing fruitful issue in any degree, is sufficient to prove that unfruitful marriages, or speedy extinction of mixed families, are not to be ascribed to physical incompetency. Nor is another concomitant fact to be overlooked, namely, that the nobler type absorbs the degraded, not the degraded the nobler. Nature always tends towards perfection, and the image of God, hidden under deviations from the perfect type, returns, jure postliminii, as soon as outward impediments are removed.

But, on the other hand, the method of proving (what physiology never can do) the historical affinity or consanguinity of such peculiar scions with the original Asiatic stock must be very strict and methodical, not only in order to convince those who maintain that the presumption is against our hypothesis, but also to prevent our remarks from being encumbered by an unmethodical, because unconnected, comparison. It is only after we have established the relative position of the leading Asiatic families of organic languages that we can proceed to the eccentric formations of Africa, America, and Polynesia. Then only shall we be able to discover which among those Asiatic families and branches is, as regards physiology and geography, and especially language, nearest of kin to each of them. By this means we shall be enabled to point out that part of the great stem from which those scions branched off, the stage of development at which they separated.

FOURTH CHAPTER.

THE CHRONOLOGICAL QUESTION EXAMINED.

THE solution of the ethnological and linguistic question is also of great importance as furnishing the possibility of establishing an approximative primordial chronology. The time which these scions must have required for forming and fixing for ever their own peculiarities is not calculated in the chronology of the human race. It only runs parallel to a part of that straight line of development which historical humanity presents. The great stream of universal history runs in a few great beds, the rest are canals branching off from them. Carrying on the metaphor of the common stem, the problem for fixing the place of what we may call eccentric formations consists in finding the knot from which they branched off towards their isolated idiosyncrastic existence, by which they generally lost much of their original hereditary consciousness, and frequently indulged in luxuriant secondary formations. If this method can be followed out, it is clear that the series of development in the languages of Asia, formed with the assistance of their deposits in Europe and Egypt, may give us the epochs of the primeval world, and a certain approximative chronology of the ante-historical age in the ordinary sense of the word. We have seen what is the minimum of time required for the formation of an affiliated language. Those who are not persuaded of the truth of our hypothesis will, at all events, do well to follow out the same method as to comparative philology. For if the different stages of development, as we have shown

them to be inherent to language, do not represent the epochs of one and the same language of mankind, but the independent history of originally different tribes, having no historical connexion with each other, our central series, if true in itself, must even according to their views represent ideal stages of development, which will be best understood by following the plan proposed by us. Of those central formations some are to be considered as collateral and therefore synchronistic, according to the principles laid down in the theory.*

* "In the hymns of the Rigveda' we still find the clearest proofs that the five principal tribes, the Yadus, Turvasas, Druhyus, Anus, and Pûrus, were closely connected by ties of nationality, and had their gods in common. In the succeeding age, that of the epic poetry of the Mahabharata, these five nations are represented as the sons of Yayâti, one of the patriarchs of the Indian world. Yayâti curses four of his sons, and the curse of Turvasa is, that he shall live without laws and follow the brutish propensities of the barbarians in the North. In the name of Turvasa, as well as afterwards in that given to the Indo-Scythian kings in the history of Kashmir, Tûr-ushka, we find the same root as in the Zend Tûra, the name of the nations of the North. But tûra itself signifies quick, from the root tvar, to run, to fly, and thus their very name offers the same characteristic of these nomadic equestrian tribes, which is afterwards ascribed to them by Firdusi, and which makes them always appear in India, as well as on the Sassanian inscriptions of Persia, as the An-irân, or no-Arian people, that is, as the enemies of the agricul. tural and civilizing nations." See Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, p. 728.

FIFTH CHAPTER.

THE LANGUAGES OF THE NORTH-AMERICAN INDIANS ARE PROBABLY SCIONS OF THE MONGOLIAN STEM.

Ir is not yet proved in detail, but it appears highly probable, in comformity with our general principles, that the native languages of the northern continent of America, comprizing tribes and nations of very different degrees of civilization, from the Esquimaux of the polar regions to the Aztecs of Mexico, are of one origin, and a scion of the Turanian tribe. The similarity in the conformation of the skull renders this affinity highly probable. The wonderful analogy in the grammatical structure of these languages, with each other and with the Turanian tongues of Asia, is universally admitted; and we think that the curious and, at first sight, startling problem, of the apparent entire diversity of the lexicographical portion of those American languages, by the side of that grammatical affinity, will be satisfactorily accounted for upon a fuller acquaintance with the roots, and by the application of our principle of secondary formations sometimes overlaying the ancient stock of roots.

I had written so far in July, 1847. I was not then aware that on the 3rd of March of the same year, an Act had passed the Congress of the United States of America, authorizing the publication of a great national work on the Indian tribes of the territory of that Republic. In 1850, the first volume of that gigantic work appeared, and now a third volume, printed in

1853, has been transmitted to me by the liberality of that government.*

It may fairly be said that, by this great national and Christian undertaking, which realizes the aspirations of President Jefferson, and carries out to their full extent the labours and efforts of a Secretary of State, the Honourable Albert Galatin, the government of the United States has done more for the antiquities and language of a foreign race than any European government has hitherto done for the language of their ancestors. Certainly, scarcely any single man has done more for collecting and digesting the materials than Mr. Schoolcraft, whose own observations and inquiries form the most important part of that publication. The whole work is conceived in a spirit of true philanthropy, and breathes a feeling of brotherhood towards the Indian scion of the human species. The section on language is without doubt the most important portion; it occupies a place in the second and third volumes, and we may hope to see it completed in the course of the following volumes. But the linguistic data before us, combined with the traditions and customs, and, particularly, with the system of pictorial or mnemonic writing (first revealed in this work), enable me to say, that the Asiatic origin of all these tribes is as fully proved as the unity of family among themselves. According to our system, the Indian languages can only be a deposit of a north Turanian idiom. Indeed, in addition to the evidence already collected by Prichard, the passage of tribes from Siberia (where we also find traces of the same pictorial writing), over the northern islands, is placed beyond all doubt by the work in question. The Mongolian peculiarity of the skull, the type of the hunter, the Shamanic

* Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. Collected and prepared under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, per Act of Congress, March 3rd, 1847, by Henry R. Schoolcraft, LL.D. Published by authority of Congress. Part i. Philadelphia, 1851; Part ii. 1852; Part iii. 1853; great quarto, with numerous plates.