The aborigines of America, except the Esquimaux, are unlike the
natives of other countries; the most marked difference is in their
language. They are divided into a number of tribes differing from each
other in some respects, yet with manners, customs and religious
beliefs generally similar.
In South America there are more than one hundred distinct languages,
and two thousand dialects. About five or six million Indians have as
many dialects as are found among the 800,000,000 inhabitants of Europe
and Asia. Their languages are polysynthetic, being of a higher type
than the agglutinative languages. In the polysynthetic tongue the
substantive, adjective and verb are joined or combined, and oftentimes
a whole sentence will be comprised in a single word.
The natives in the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon are forced to
cultivate a little ground on the flood-plains, as the forests are
thick and impenetrable. They live principally on the fruit of the palm
(of which there are five hundred varieties), cocoa and bananas, fish
and turtles. There are no roads or paths through the forests except
the numerous channels of the rivers, called igarapes or furos. The
tribes on the pampas live principally on game and wild cattle.
Humboldt tells us that the navigator on the Orinoco sees with surprise
at night the palm trees illuminated by large fires. From {8} the
trunks of these trees are suspended the habitations of a tribe of
Indians, who make their fires on mats hung in the air and filled with
moist clay. The same palm tree furnishes also food and wine and
clothing, and thus supplies every want and even the luxuries of life.
The Indian race as a whole is believed to be superior to both the
negro and the Malay, as neither of those races has ever attained to
the civilization of the Incas of Peru or of the Indians of Mexico and
the Aztecs of Central America. Many of their myths and folk tales are
common, not only to the Indians of one part of the country, but also
to other tribes in distant parts of the continent, and even to the
negroes of Africa, and the Arabs of upper Egypt. All the tribes on the
continent have substantially the same habits of life, the same methods
of warfare, the same general characteristics, and a language built
substantially on the same plan.
From these observations it might seem that the Indian tribes of South
America were allied to those of Africa or to the Malays, but on
further consideration the similarity seems due rather to a like stage
of civilization than to identity of race.