Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/851

Rh other region of the globe where so great a variety of colour prevails. The more general tints are a copper or cinnamon brown, and olive yellow; but the subjoined table of tribes, grouped according to their colour, shows that the extremes of a deep brown almost approaching a true black, and of a light or fair hue almost approaching a true white, also occur, altogether independently of latitude, climate, or elevation of the land:—

Similar tables might easily be drawn up of stature, varying from the dwarfish Eskimo, Fuegian (mean 5 ft. 1 in.), and Peruvian (mean 4 ft, 9 in.) to the gigantic Patagonian, the tallest race on the globe.

No less varied are the other physical traits, while the wide divergence of mental capacity is sufficiently indicated on the one hand by the Cherokees of the southern Alleghanies, who in 1824 invented a complete syllabic writing system, and who can reckon to a million and upwards, and on the other by the Chiquitos of the Bolivian lowlands, who, D'Orbigny assures us (op. cit., ii. p. 163), "cannot get beyond one (tama), after which they have nothing but terms of comparison." The only real intellectual faculty common to all the American races is that implied by the peculiar polysynthetic mechanism of their speech. But beneath this general morphological structure, the substance of the languages themselves varies greatly in all that concerns their phonetic systems, vocabularies, relational forms, syntax, and methods of combination. While, for instance, the Thlinkeet of the extreme north-west Pacific seaboard, the Apache of Arizona, the Quichua of Peru, and the Aymara of the Bolivian uplands are amongst the very harshest and most guttural tongues in the world, the Otuke of the Bolivian plains, the Mohave of Arizona, the Chiquito of the upper Paraguay basin, the Samucu on the north frontier of Gran Chaco, and many Amazonian dialects are distinguished by great softness, often rivalling in euphony the most musical languages of the eastern hemisphere. The linguistic families differ from each other, not only in the measure to which their polysynthesis has been developed, but even in its very character, so that while some have scarcely yet arrived at a clear differentiation of verb and noun, others, like the Iroquois, have a purely verbal, others again, such as the extinct Timucua of Florida, an exclusively nominal inflexion. In the same way some are partial to prefixes, some to suffixes, some to infixes. Many of the Californian idioms seem to be still verging on the agglutinating stage, while the just-mentioned Timucua, the Aztec, Choctaw, Shoshone, Cree, Matlalzinca, and others of the Anahuac table-land, have reached the very acme of polysynthesis, in which all the parts of the sentence often become by indefinite composition and syncope fused into one interminable "bunch-word" of from ten to fifteen syllables and upwards. As these languages also differ entirely in their vocabularies, often possessing not a single root in common, it follows that they can be no more classed together than can for instance the various agglutinating tongues of the Caucasus or the Soudan.

It thus appears hopeless to look for any unity of details in the mental and physical faculties of the American aborigines. What they have in common is reducible to one physical and one mental quality, the universal texture and black colour of the hair, and their polysynthetic speech. These two properties point directly at primordial unity of origin; the endless varieties of detail argue a prodigious antiquity and an independent development of the race on the American continent. The variety renders the work of classification a labour of extreme difficulty and uncertainty. Amidst all these endless points of divergence, it seems impossible to find any common basis round which to group the various tribes and races, and the problem becomes further complicated by the fact that, while many of these tribes differ in speech, though evidently of one racial stock, others belonging to the same linguistic connexion present the widest physical discrepancies. Thus the Chiquitos and the Moxos peoples of Bolivia, obviously of one ethnical type, speak several fundamentally distinct languages. The same is true of the Moqui, Queres, Islettn, Tegua, Zuñi, and other New Mexican Pueblos, while the reverse phenomenon is presented by the Montagnais and Nasquapees of Labrador, both of whom speak closely related Cree dialects, yet differ so much in appearance that, "judging from their exterior, one would suppose them to belong to different families of the human race" (Hind's Labrador, i. p. 332). Within comparatively narrow areas occurs occasionally every conceivable element of confusion, as in California and the south-western States, occupied by the morally debased and physically degraded Pah-Utes, the tall and manly Mohaves, the ferocious Apaches, the mild and intellectual Indians of the New Mexican Pueblos, some fishers and hunters, some living on roots and berries, some skilled agriculturists, all speaking fundamentally distinct languages.

It is evidently impossible in such a case to adhere throughout to any one method of classification, and the following tentative survey is consequently based partly on the linguistic and partly on the ethnical elements, but partly also on mere geographical grounds. Fortunately there are in all the divisions of the continent a few great families, occupying vast regions, in which the ethnical and linguistic elements largely coincide. Foremost amongst these are the sub-arctic races and the Athabascans, Algonquins, and Dakotas in the north, the Maya-Quiché in the centre, and in the south the Caribs, Quichua-Aymaras, and Guaranis. These eight stocks cover jointly an area of not less than 11 millions of square miles, with a total Rh