"The North American Indian tribes, instead of speaking related dialects, originating in a single parent language, in reality speak many languages, belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent unity of origin."
To the north of Mexico (Plate VI) the aborigines are divided into 58 linguistic families. In a large portion of these languages there are tribal dialects not understood by members of other tribes of the same family. Thus the Algonquin linguistic family contains some 30 or 40 distinct languages. In the Athapascan the diversity is nearly as great. The smaller families present similar conditions in proportionate degree, although there are stocks which speak but one language. Four of the linguistic families referred to extend into Mexico, but to the south of the territory occupied by them other languages and dialects are spoken. Ethnologists who have studied the tribes of Mexico report 19 linguistic stocks, containing 108 distinct languages, among which there are upward of 60 dialects. In Central America
a similar diversity in the native tongues exists. Reclus, in his great work The Earth and its Inhabitants, states that in the New World 450 native languages are spoken—a number greater than that of all the languages in use in the rest of the earth. Not only are the American linguistic stocks different from each other, and fail to furnish evidence of having been derived from a single parent tongue, but, as philologists assure us, no one of them is analogous to any language spoken in other lands.
As is well known, a language is not created de novo, but by a slow process of development. Since the first acquirement of articulate speech by man a succession of languages has appeared owing to the growth, differentiation, etc., of pre-existing forms of speech. It is a warrantable inference, therefore, that the marvellous diversity in speech present in America could only have arisen by a process of evolution involving a very long period of time.
As the American languages have no affinity with the Teutonic or Semitic stocks, it is evident that the source or sources from which they came far antedate the birth of the oldest people of which history takes cognizance. Man must therefore have set foot on American soil before the sprouting of the linguistic twig which, after millenniums, produced the cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Persia and Assyria.
The diversity of arts, customs, myths, religions, etc., among the American aborigines, and their difference in nearly all instances from the analogous attributes of the peoples of other lands, also point to a long period of isolated development in much the same manner as has been referred to in the case of a comparative study of their languages. The skin boats used by the Eskimos are widely different from the birch-bark canoes of the Algonquins, and these again differ conspicuously from the dug-out canoes of southeastern Alaska and British Columbia; still other varieties of boats are peculiar to the more southern Indian tribes, and all alike differ from the boats used in other lands. Like individuality pertains also to the houses of the American aborigines, their clothing, arms, utensils, basket-work, picture-writings, etc. One is forced to recognise in each of these arts or industries
not only development in many diverging lines among the various tribes, but the birth of ideas analogous to those which arose in other lands, and their independent growth under special conditions. All of this, and much more in the same general direction that might be discussed did space permit, points to a great antiquity for the indigenous American peoples.
Among the nations of the Old World certain plants have been under domestication for so long a time, and have varied so greatly, that the wild species from which they came are no longer known. This is true of nearly all our common fruits and vegetables and many of our flowers that were derived from the Old World. At the time of the Spanish conquest the aborigines of America were cultivating tobacco, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, squashes, maize, cotton, etc., and in the case of most of these plants the wild species from which they were derived has not been ascertained. The argument that points to a great antiquity in the case of wheat and the peach applies equally well to tobacco and maize, and indicates that horticulture began in America in remote antiquity. At the time of Columbus, the ox, sheep, goat, pigeons, fowls, cat, etc., long domesticated in the Old, were absent in the New World, and the llama, turkey, etc., indigenous in America, were unknown in Europe. These striking differences, among which there is not even a single exception, amount to positive evidence that contact between the peoples of the Old and the New World did not occur after the inhabitants of the former emerged from savagery, or, what is the same thing, never existed in the sense that trade relations were entered into. This same line of argument seemingly casts grave doubts on the deductions already referred to concerning the importation into America from Polynesia of the practise of tattooing, the wearing of masks, the use of labrets, etc.; and indicates also that but slight changes were produced in the American aborigines owing to the wrecking of Asiatic junks on the northwest coast.
Another factor bearing on the antiquity of the indigenous Americans is the stage of development reached in spite of their long and nearly complete isolation. Stimuli from without,
and particularly contact with more advanced peoples, having been lacking or of small importance, incentive to bodily and mental activity arose mainly from the desire for food, clothing, and shelter, and from intertribal rivalry, jealousy, and war. This process of indigenous development was certainly slow. With man, as with the lower animals, the rate of advance and of specialization increases as higher and higher grades of development are reached. For the American aborigines to have attained the higher stages of barbarism at the time of the arrival of civilized Europeans, solely by self-growth and self-education, is perhaps even a stronger argument for their antiquity than their differentiation in culture, languages, etc.