languages of America towards an endless multiplication of distinct
dialects. Those again have been grouped by the synthetic process of
Hervas into eleven families: seven for the northern continent, and four
for South America. But we are as yet only on the threshold of this
important branch of research. In two papers contributed by M. Lucien
Adam to the _Congrès International des Americanistes_, he gives the
results of a careful examination of sixteen languages of North and South
America; and arrives at the conclusion that they belong to a number of
independent families as essentially distinct as they would have been
“had there been primitively several human pairs.” Dr. Brinton, one of
the highest authorities on any question connected with native American
languages, contributed a paper to the _American Antiquarian_ (Jan.
1886), “On the Study of the Nahuatl Language.” This language, which is
popularly known as Aztec, he strongly commends to the study of American
philologists. It is one of the most completely organised of Indian
languages, has a literature of considerable extent and variety, and is
still in use by upwards of half a million of people. It is from this
area, southward through Central America, and in the great seat of native
South American civilisation, that we can alone hope to recover direct
evidence of ancient intercourse between the Old and the New World. But,
here again, the complexities of language seem to grow apace. In Dr.
Brinton’s _Notes on the Mangue, an extinct Language formerly spoken in
Nicaragua_, he states, as a result of his later studies, that the belief
which he once entertained of some possible connection between this
dialect and the Aymara of Peru, has not been confirmed on further
examination. This, therefore, tends to sustain the prevailing opinion of
scholars that there is no direct affiliation between the languages of
North and South America. All this is suggestive either of an idea, such
as that which Agassiz favoured in his system of natural provinces of the
animal world, in relation to different types of man, on which he based
the conclusion that the diverse varieties of American man originated in
various centres, and had been distributed from them over the entire
continent; or we must assume immigration from different foreign centres.
Accepting the latter as the more tenable proposition, I long ago
sketched a scheme of immigration such as seemed to harmonise with the
suggestive, though imperfect evidence. This assumed the earliest current
of population, in its progress from a supposed Asiatic cradleland, to
have spread through the islands of the Pacific, and reached the South
American continent before any excess of population had diffused itself
into the inhospitable northern steppes of Asia. By an Atlantic oceanic
migration, another wave of population occupied the Canaries, Madeiras,
and the Azores, and so passed to the Antilles, Central America, and
probably by the Cape Verdes, or, guided by the more southern equatorial
current, to Brazil. Latest of all, Behring Strait and the North Pacific
Islands may have become the highway for a migration by which certain
striking diversities among nations of the northern continent, including
the conquerors of the Mexican plateau, are most easily accounted for.
It is not necessary to include in the question here discussed, the more
comprehensive one of the existence of man in America contemporary with
the great extinct animals of the Quaternary Period; though the
acknowledged affinities of Asiatic and American anthropology, taken in
connection with the remoteness of any assignable period for migration
from Asia to the American continent, renders it far from improbable that
the latest oscillations of land may here also have exercised an
influence. The present soundings of Behring Strait, and the bed of the
sea extending southward to the Aleutian Islands, entirely accord with
the assumption of a former continuity of land between Asia and America.
The idea to which the speculations of Darwin, founded on his
observations during the voyage of the ‘Beagle’ gave rise, of a
continuous subsidence of the Pacific Ocean, also favoured the
probability of greater insular facilities for trans-oceanic migration at
the supposed period of the peopling of America from Asia. But more
recent explorations, and especially those connected with the
‘Challenger’ expedition, fail to confirm the old theory of the origin of
the coral islands of the Pacific; and in any view of the case, we must
be content to study the history of existing races, alike of Europe and
America, apart from questions relating to palæocosmic man. If the vague
legend of the lost Atlantis embodies any trace of remotest historical
tradition, it belongs to a modern era compared with the men either of
the European drift, or of the post-glacial deposits of the Delaware and
the auriferous gravels of California. When resort is had to comparative
philology, it is manifest that we must be content to deal with a more
recent era than contemporaries of the Mastodon, and their congeners of
Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer periods, notwithstanding the fact that the
modern representatives of the latter have been sought within the
American Arctic circle.
Such evidence as a comparison of languages thus far supplies, lends more
countenance to the idea of migration through the islands of the Pacific,
than to such a route from the Mediterranean as is implied in any
significance attached to the legend of Atlantis. As to the Behring
Strait route, present ethnology and philology point rather to an
overflow of Arctic American population into Asia. Gallatin was the first
to draw attention to certain analogies in the structure of Polynesian
and American languages, as deserving of investigation; and pointed out
the peculiar mode of expressing the tense, mood, and voice of the verb,
by affixed particles, and the value given to place over time, as
indicated in the predominant locative verbal form. Such are to be looked
for with greater probability among the languages of South America; but
the substitution of affixed particles for inflections, especially in
expressing the direction of action in relation to the speaker, is common
to the Polynesian and the Oregon languages, and has analogies in the
Cherokee. The distinction between the inclusive and exclusive pronoun
_we_, according as it means “you and I,” or “they and I,” etc., is as
characteristic of the Maori as of the Ojibway. Other observations of
more recent date have still further tended to countenance the
recognition of elements common to the languages of Polynesia and
America; and so to point to migration by the Pacific to the western
continent.
But this idea of a migration through the islands of the Pacific receives
curious confirmation from another source. In an ingenious paper on “The
Origin of Primitive Money,”[1] originally read at the meeting of the
British Association at Montreal in 1884, Mr. Horatio Hale shows that
there is good reason for believing that the most ancient currency in
China consisted of disks and slips of tortoise shell. The fact is stated
in the great Chinese encyclopædia of the Emperor Kang-he, who reigned in
the early years of the eighteenth century; and the Chinese annalists
assert that metal coins have been in use from the time of Fuh-he, about
B.C. 2950. Without attempting to determine the specific accuracy of
Chinese chronology, it is sufficient to note here that the most ancient
form of Chinese copper cash is the disk, perforated with a square hole,
so as to admit of the coins being strung together. This, which
corresponds in form to the large perforated shell-disks, or native
currency of the Indians of California, and with specimens recovered from
ancient mounds, Mr. Hale regards as the later imitation in metal of the
original Chinese shell money. A similar shell-currency, as he shows, is
in use among many islanders of the Pacific; and he traces it from the
Loo-Choo Islands, across the vast archipelago, through many island
groups, to California; and then overland, with the aid of numerous
disclosures from ancient mounds, to the Atlantic coast, where the
Indians of Long Island were long noted for its manufacture in the later
form of wampum. “The natives of Micronesia,” says Mr. Hale, who, it will
be remembered, records the results of personal observation, “in
character, usages, and language, resemble to a certain extent the
nations of the southern and eastern Pacific groups, which are included
in the designation of Polynesia, but with some striking differences,
which careful observers have ascribed, with great probability, to
influences from north-eastern Asia. They are noted for their skill in
navigation. They have well-rigged vessels, exceeding sixty feet in
length. They sail by the stars, and are accustomed to take long
voyages.” To such voyagers, the Pacific presents no more formidable
impediments to oceanic enterprise than did the Atlantic to the Northmen
of the tenth century.
Throughout the same archipelago, modern exploration is rendering us
familiar with examples of remarkable stone structures and colossal
sculptured figures, such as those from Easter Island now in the British
Museum. Rude as they undoubtedly are, they are highly suggestive of an
affinity to the megalithic sculptures and cyclopean masonry of Peru.
Monuments of this class were noted long ago by Captain Beechy on some of
the islands nearest the coasts of Chili and Peru. Since then the
megalithic area has been extended by their discovery in other island
groups lying towards the continent of Asia.
Another subsidiary class of evidence of a different kind, long since
noted by me, gives additional confirmation to this recovered trail of
ancient migration through the islands of the Pacific to the American
continent. The practice to which the Flathead Indians of Oregon and
British Columbia owe their name, the compressed skulls from Peruvian
cemeteries, and the widely diffused evidence of the prevalence of such
artificial malformation among many American tribes, combine to indicate
it as one of the most characteristic American customs. Yet the evidence
is abundant which shows it not only as a practice among rude Asiatic
Mongol tribes of primitive centuries; but proves that it was still in
use among the Huns and Avars who contended with the Barbarians from the
Baltic for the spoils of the decaying Roman empire. Nor was it merely
common to tribes of both continents. It furnishes another link in the
chain of evidence of ancient migration from Asia to America; as is
proved by its practice in some of the islands of the Pacific, as
described by Dr. Pickering,[2] and since abundantly confirmed by the
forms of Kanaka skulls. By following up the traces of this strange
custom, perpetuated among the tribes on the Pacific coasts both of
Northern and Southern America to our own day, we thus once more retrace
the steps of ancient wanderers, and are carried back to centuries when
the Macrocephali of the Euxine attracted the observant eye of
Hippocrates, and became familiar to Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela.
But the wanderings among the insular races of the Pacific are not
limited to such remote eras. Later changes are also recorded by other
evidence. The direct relationship of existing Polynesian languages is
not Mongol but Malay; but this is the intrusive element of a time long
subsequent to the growth of characteristic features which still
perpetuate traces of Polynesian and American affinities. The number and
diversity of the languages of the continent of America, and their
essentially native vocabularies, prove that the latter have been in
prolonged process of development, free from contact with languages which
appear to have been still modelling themselves according to the same
plan of thought in many scattered islands of the Pacific.
The remarkable amount of culture in the languages of some of the
barbarous nations of North America, traceable, apparently, to the
important part which the orator played in their deliberative assemblies,
has not unnaturally excited surprise: but in any attempt to recover the
history of the New World by the aid of philology we must deal with the
languages of its civilised races. Among those the Nahuatl or Aztec has
been appealed to; and the Mayas have been noted as a lettered people
whose hieroglyphic records, and later transcripts of written documents,
are now the object of intelligent investigation both by European and
American philologists. The Maya language strikingly contrasts, in its
soft, vocalic forms, with the languages of nations immediately to the
north of its native area. It is that which, according to Stephens, was
affirmed to be still spoken by a living race in a region beyond the
Great Sierra, extending to Yucatan and the Mexican Gulf. Others among
the cultured native languages which seem to invite special study are the
Aymara and the Quichua. Of these, the latter was the classical language
of South America, wherein, according to its native historians, the
Peruvian chroniclers and poets incorporated the national legends. It may
be described as having occupied a place under Inca rule analogous to
that of the Norman French in England from the eleventh to the thirteenth
century. To those ancient, cultured languages of the seats of an
indigenous civilisation, and with a literature of their own, attention
is now happily directed. The students of American ethnology begin to
realise that the buried mounds of Assyria are not richer in discoveries
relative to the ancient history of Asia than are the monuments, the
hieroglyphic records, and the languages of Central America and Peru, in
relation to a native social life which long flourished as a product of
their own West. To this occidental Assyria we have to look for an answer
to many inquiries, especially interesting to the intrusive occupants of
the western continent. If its architecture and sculpture, and the
hieroglyphic records with which they are enriched, are modifications of
a prehistoric Asiatic civilisation, it is here that the evidence is to
be looked for; and if the arts of the sculptor and architect were
brought to the continent of America by wanderers from an Asiatic
fatherland, then those of the potter and of the metallurgist will also
prove to be an inheritance from the old Asiatic hive of the nations.
From the evidence thus far adduced it appears that ethnically the
American is Mongol, and by the agglutinative element in many of the
native languages may be classed as Turanian. The Finnic hypothesis of
Rask, however much modified by later reconsideration of the question of
the origin of the Aryans, as well as the European melanochroic Metis of
Huxley, pertains to a prehistoric era of which the Finns and the Basques
are assumed to be survivals; and to that elder era, rather than to any
date within the remotest limits of authentic history, the languages of
America seem to refer us in the search for any common origin with those
of the eastern hemisphere. But a zealous comparative philologist,
already referred to, has sought for linguistic traces of relationship
between the Old and the New World which, if confirmed, would better
harmonise with the traditions of intercourse between the maritime
nations of the eastern Mediterranean and a continent lying outside of
the Pillars of Hercules. In his investigations he aims at determining
the relations of the Aztec or Nahuatl culture and language to those of
Asia. Humboldt long ago claimed for much of the former an Old World
derivation. It seems premature to attempt to deduce any comprehensive
results from the meagre data thus far gathered. But the author of _The
Khita and Khita-Peruvian Epoch_, in tracing the progress of his Sumerian
race, assigns an interval of 4000 years since their settlement in
Babylonia and India. In like manner, on the assumption of their
migration from a common Asiatic centre, which the division of Western
and Eastern Sumerian in pronouns and other details is thought to
indicate, Peru, it is conceived, may have been reached by a migratory
wave of earlier movement, from 4000 to 5000 years ago. Mr. Hyde Clarke
indeed conceives that it is quite within compass that the same great
wave of migration which passed over India and Babylonia, continued to
propagate its centrifugal force, and that by its means Peru was reached
within the last 3000 years. But, whatever intercourse may possibly have
then been carried on between the Old and the New World, it must be
obvious, on mature reflection, that so recent a date for the peopling of
South America from Asia is as little reconcilable with the very remote
traces of linguistic affinity thus far adduced, as it is with any
fancied relationship with a lost Atlantis of the elder world. The
enduring affinities of long-parted languages of the Old World tell a
very different tale. With the comparative philologist, as with the
archæologist, time is more and more coming to be recognised as an
all-important factor.
But, leaving the estimate of centuries out of consideration, in the
researches into the origin of the peculiar native civilisation of
America here referred to, the recently deciphered Akkad is accepted as
the typical language of the Sumerian class. This is assumed to have
started from High Asia, and to have passed on to Babylonia; while
another branch diffused itself by India and Indo-China, and thence, by
way of the islands of the Pacific, reached America. Hence, in an
illustrative table of Sumerian words arranged under four heads, as
Western, Indo-Chinese, Peruvian, and Mexican, etc., it is noted that
“while in some cases a root may be traced throughout, it will be seen
that more commonly the western and American roots or types, cross in the
Indo-Chinese region.” But another and older influence, related to the
Agaw of the Nile region, is also traced in the Guarani, Omagua, and
other languages of South America, indicating evidences of more remote
relations with the Old World, and with the African continent. This is
supposed to have been displaced by a Sumerian migration by which the
Aymara domination was established in Peru, and the Maya element
introduced into Yucatan. Those movements are assumed to belong to an era
of civilisation, during which the maritime enterprise of the Pacific may
have been carried on upon a scale unknown to the most adventurous of
modern Malay navigators, notwithstanding the essentially maritime
character by which the race is still distinguished. All this implies
that the highway to the Pacific was familiar to both continents; and
hence a second migration is recognised, in certain linguistic relations,
between the Siamese and other languages of Indo-China, and the Quichua
and Aztec of Peru and Mexico. But the problem of the origin of the races
of the western continent, and of the sources of its native civilisation,
is still in that preliminary stage in which the accumulation of
materials on which future induction may be based is of more value than
the most comprehensive generalisations.
The vastness of the American twin continents, with their Atlantic and
Pacific seaboard reaching from the Arctic well-nigh to the Antarctic
circle, furnishes a tempting stimulus to theories of migration on the
grandest scale, and to the assumption of comprehensive schemes of
international relation in prehistoric centuries. But they are not more
substantial than the old legend of Atlantis. The best that can be said
of them is that here, at any rate, are lines of research in the
prosecution of which American ethnologists may employ their learning and
acumen encouraged by the hope of yet revealing a past not less
marvellous, and possessing a more personal interest, than all which
geology has recovered from the testimony of the rocks. But before such
can be more than dimly guessed at, the patient diligence of many
students will be needed to accumulate the needful materials. Nor can we
afford to delay the task. The Narraganset Bible, the work of Eliot, the
apostle of the Indians, is the memorial of a race that has perished;
while other nations and languages have disappeared since his day, with
no such invaluable record of their character. Mr. Horatio Hale published
in the _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society_, in 1883, a
paper on the “Tutelo Tribe and Language,” derived from Nikonha, the last
survivor of a once powerful tribe of North Carolina. To Dr. Brinton, we
owe the recent valuable notes on the Mangue, another extinct language.
On the North-western Canadian prairies the buffalo has disappeared, and
the Indian must follow. On all hands, we are called upon to work
diligently while it is yet time, in order to accumulate the materials
out of which the history of the western hemisphere is to be evolved.
It accords with the idea of Polynesian genealogy, that indications
suggestive of grammatical affinity have been noted in languages of South
America, in their mode of expressing the tense of the verb; in the
formation of causative, reciprocal, potential, and locative verbs by
affixes; and in the general system of compound word structure. The
incorporation of the particle with the verbal root, appears to embody
the germ of the more comprehensive American holophrasms. Such affinities
point to others more markedly Asiatic; for analogies recognised between
the languages of the Deccan and those of the Polynesian group in
relation to the determinative significance of the formative particles on
the verbal root, reappear in some of the characteristic peculiarities of
American languages. On this subject, the Rev. Richard Garnett remarked,
in a communication to the Philological Society, that most of the native
American languages of which we have definite information, bear a general
analogy alike to the Polynesian family and to the languages of the
Deccan, in their methods of distinguishing the various modifications of
time; and he adds: “We may venture to affirm, in general terms, that a
South American verb is constructed precisely as those in the Tamil and
other languages of Southern India; consisting, like them, of a verbal
root, a second element defining the time of the action, and a third
denoting the subject or person.”
So far it becomes apparent that the evidence, derived alike from
language and from other sources, points to the isolation of the American
continent through unnumbered ages. The legend of the lost Atlantis is
true in this, if in nothing else, that it relegates the knowledge of the
world beyond the Atlantic, by the maritime races of the Mediterranean,
to a time already of hoar antiquity in the age of Socrates, or even of
Solon. But at a greatly later date the Caribbean Sea was scarcely more a
mystery to the dwellers on the shores of the Ægean, than was the Baltic
or the North Sea. Herodotus, indeed, expressly affirms his disbelief in
“a river, called by the barbarians, Eridanus, which flows into a
northern sea, and from which there is a report that amber is wont to
come.” Nevertheless, we learn from him of Greek traders exchanging
personal ornaments and woven stuffs for the furs and amber of the North.
They ascended the Dneiper as far as Gerrhos, a trading-post, forty days’
journey inland; and the tokens of their presence there have been
recovered in modern times. Not only hoards of Greek coins, minted in the
fifth century B.C., but older golden gryphons of Assyrian workmanship
have been recovered during the present century, near Bromberg in Posen,
and at Kiev on the Dneiper. As also, afar on the most northern island of
the Azores, hoards of Carthaginian coins have revealed traces of the old
Punic voyager there; if still more ancient voyagers from Sidon, Tyre, or
Seleucia, did find their way in some forgotten century to lands that lay
beyond the waste of waters which seemed to engirdle their world: similar
evidence may yet be forthcoming among the traces of ancient native
civilisation in Central or Southern America.