"The Indian and the negro races, both fated, as it seems, to yield the supremacy to the whites, present in every other particular a curious contrast to each other. The red man appears to have received from nature every quality which contributes to greatness, except—I have no other word for it—tamability; he has shown in many remarkable instances intellectual capacity, talents for government, eloquence, energy, and self-command.... There is something noble and striking—something that commands respect and admiration, in the Indian character, irreconcilable though it be with advanced civilization and the operation of Christian influences. The negro, on the contrary, has precisely what the Indian wants; he is a domestic animal.... The Indian avoids his conqueror; the negro bows at his feet. The Indian loves the independence and privations of his solitude better than all the flesh-pots of Egypt; the negro, if left to himself, is helpless and miserable: he must have society and sensual pleasures; if he be allowed to eat and drink well, to dance, to sing, and to make love, he seems to have no further or higher aspirations, and to care nothing for the degradation of his race. With the single exception of Toussaint, I know no instance of a negro distinguishing himself in politics, or arms, or letters; and though I make every allowance for the difficulties and obstacles to his doing so which his situation imposes on him, I can not allow that these account for the fact that, notwithstanding the excellent education which many negroes receive, and the stimulus afforded by constant intercourse with whites, not one of them has yet, either here or in the West Indies, with the above-named exception, taken the lead among his countrymen, or made a name for himself. And this natural superiority of the Indian is, perhaps unconsciously, recognized and illustrated in a singular manner by the white man, in the different feelings which he exhibits upon the subject of amalgamation with the two races. Some of the best families in the United States are proud to trace their origin to Indian chiefs (e.g., the Randolphs of Virginia boast that they came of the lineage of Powhatan); and I have myself met with half-breeds who were considered (and most justly) in every respect equal in estimation with full-blooded whites. It is needless to observe, that with respect to the negroes, the precise converse is the case. Cæteris paribus, we seem naturally to receive the red man as our equal."—Godley's Letters from America, vol. i., p. 153.
No. XLV.
"These islands were partly discovered by Behring in 1741, and the rest at several periods since his time. The most considerable of them amount to forty in number, and they may be justly considered as a branch of the Kamtskadale Mountains continued in the sea. The three small islands, known by the names of Attak, Shemya, and Semitshi, with a few others, were denominated by the Russians Aleutskie Ostrova, because a bold rock in the language of these parts is called 'Aleut.' In the sequel this name was extended to the whole chain, though a part of it is named the Andreanoffskoi, and the rest, lying further toward America, the Fox Islands. The survey of these islands, more anciently discovered by the Russians, and of the adjacent parts of the two continents, was made by Captain Cook in his third voyage, in 1778. If the Russians, then, can deservedly claim the priority of the discovery, no one can withhold from the adventurous and persevering Captain Cook the glory and the merit of having fixed the distance of the two continents and their respective extent, to the east for Asia, and to the west for North America."—Rees's Cyclopædia, art. Aleutian Islands.
No. XLVI.
"Almost every where in the New World we recognize a multiplicity of forms and tenses in the verb, an artificial industry to indicate before-hand, either by inflection of the personal pronouns, which form the terminations of the verb, or by an intercalated suffix, the nature and the relation of its object and its subject, and to distinguish whether the object be animate or inanimate, of the masculine or the feminine gender, simple, or in complex number. This multiplicity characterizes the rudest American languages. Astarloa reckons, in like manner, in the grammatical system of the Biscayan, 206 forms of the verb. Strange conformity in the structure of languages among races of men so different, and on spots so distant.
"Those languages, the principal tendency of which is inflection, excite less the curiosity of the vulgar than those which seem formed by aggregation. In the first, the elements of which words are composed, and which are generally reduced to a few letters, are no longer distinguished. These elements, when isolated, exhibit no meaning; the whole is assimilated and mixed together. The American languages, on the contrary, are like complicated machines, the wheels of which are exposed. The artifice is visible—I mean the industrious mechanism of their construction. We seem to be present at their formation, and we should state them to be of very recent origin, if we did not recollect that the human mind follows imperturbably an impulse once given; that nations enlarge, improve, and repair the grammatical edifice of their language according to a plan already determined; finally, that there are countries where the languages of all the institutions and the arts have remained stereotyped, as it were, during the lapse of ages. The highest degree of intellectual development has been hitherto found among nations which belong to the Indian and Pelasgic branch. The languages, formed principally by aggregation, seem themselves to oppose obstacles to the improvement of the mind. They are, in fact, unfurnished with that rapid movement, that interior life, to which the inflection of the root is favorable, and which gives so many charms to works of the imagination. Let us not, however, forget that a people celebrated in the remotest antiquity, from whom the Greeks themselves borrowed knowledge, had perhaps a language, the construction of which recalls involuntarily that of the language of America. What a scaffolding of little monosyllabic and dissyllabic forms is added to the verb and to the substantive in the Coptic language!"—Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. iii., p. 273.
In his "Researches," Humboldt observes: "We find in the New Continent languages, some of which, as the Greenland, the Cora, the Tamanac, the Totonac, and the Quichua (Archiv. fuer Ethnographie, b. i., s. 345; Vaters, s. 206), display a richness of grammatical forms which we trace nowhere in the Old World, except at Congo, and among the Biscayans, who were the remains of the ancient Cantabrians. But, amid these marks of civilization (referring to the Aztec nation), and this progressive perfection of language, it is remarkable that no people of America had attained that analysis of sounds which leads to the most admirable, we might almost say the most miraculous of all inventions, an alphabet. We are led to think that the progressive perfection of symbolic signs, and the facility with which objects are painted, had prevented the introduction of letters ... not the case in Egypt."
Chateaubriand says that the Jesuits have left important works relative to the language of the Canadian savage. Father Chaumont, who had lived fifty years among the Hurons, composed a grammar of their language. To Father Rasles, who spent ten years in an Abenakis village, we are indebted for valuable documents. A French and Iroquois dictionary—a new treasure for philologists—is finished. There is also a manuscript dictionary—Iroquois and English—but, unluckily, the first volume is lost.
"Les trois langues, Huronne, Algonquine et Siou sont les langues mères du Canada. Ils ont tous les caractères des langues primitives, et il est certain qu'elles n'ont pas une origine commune. La seule prononciation suffisoit pour le pronom. Le Siou sifle en parlant, le Huron n'a point de lettre labiale, qu'il ne sçanroit prononcer, parle du gosier et aspire presque toutes les syllabes; l'Algonquin prononce avec plus de douceur, et parle plus naturellement. Je n'ai pu rien apprendre de particulier de la première de ces trois langues; mais nos anciens missionnaires ont beaucoup travaillé sur les deux autres, et sur les principales de leurs dialectes: voici ce que j'en ais oui dire aux plus habiles.
"La langue Huronne est d'une abondance, d'une énergie, et d'une noblesse, qu'on ne trouve peut-être réunies dans aucune des plus belles, que nous connoissons, et ceux, à qui elle est propre, quoiqu'ils ne soient plus qu'une poignée d'hommes, ont encore dans l'âme une élévation, qui s'accorde bien mieux avec la majesté de leur langage, qu'avec le triste état, où ils sont réduits. Quelques uns ont cru y trouver des rapports avec l'Hébreu; d'autres en plus grand nombre ont prétendu qu'elle avoit la même origine que celle des Grecs; mais rien n'est plus frivole que les preuves, qu'ils en apportent. La langue Algonquine n'a pas autant de force, que la Huronne, mais elle a plus de douceur et d'élégance. Toutes deux ont une richesse d'expressions, une variété de tones, une propriété de termes, une régularité, qui étonnent: mais ce qui surprend encore davantage, c'est que parmi des Barbares qu'on ne voit point s'étudier à bien parler, et qui n'ont jamais eu l'usage de l'écriture, il ne s'introduit point un mauvais mot, un terme impropre, une construction vicieuse, et que les enfans mêmes en conservent, jusque dans le discours familier, toute la pureté. D'ailleurs, la manière dont ils animent tout se qu'ils disent, ne laisse aucun lieu de douter qui ne comprennent toute la valeur de leur expressions, et toute la beauté de leur langue. Dans le Huron tout se conjugue; un certain artifice, que je ne vous expliquerois pas bien, y fait distinguer des verbes, les noms, les pronoms, les adverbes, &c. Les verbes simples ont une double conjugaison, l'une absoluë, l'autre réciproque. Les troisièmes personnes ont les deux genres, car il n'y en a que deux dans ces langues; à sçavoir, le genre noble, et le genre ignoble. Pour ce qui est des nombres et des tems, on y trouve les mêmes différences que dans le Grec. Par exemple, pour raconter un voyage, on s'exprime autrement si on la fait par terre, ou si on l'a fait par eau. Les verbes actifs se multiplient autant de fois, qu'il y a de choses, qui tombent sous leur action; comme le verbe, qui signifie Manger, varie autant de fois, qu'il y a de choses comestibles. L'action s'exprime autrement à l'égard d'une chose inanimée: ainsi voir un homme, et voir une pierre, ce sont deux verbes. Se servir d'une chose, qui appartient à celui qui s'en sert, ou à celui à qui on parle, ce sont autant de verbes différens.