Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/144

132 languages of North America for instance turn out to be all dialects of five or six at the utmost. Among these is a group, to use a favourite phrase of some writers of languages, to which has been given the name of Athapascan, which name it will be useful to continue for the sake of better mutual understanding. This group of tribes seems from its present geographical position to have been perhaps the last immigration into America, and it would therefore be particularly interesting to enquire into their physical characteristics as well as into their traditions as the most likely to be of recent date and most consonant with truth and probability. Well then, of their physical characteristics, we learn from Sir Alexander Mackenzie as quoted by Dr. Prichard, that they have "round faces with high cheek bones and a complexion between the olive and copper color: small grey eyes with a tinge of red, and hair of a dark brown color inclining to black." Another tribe is described in similar terms, "The color of their eye is grey with a tinge of red; they have all high cheek bones, more remarkably the women." "These," adds Dr. Prichard, "are considerable deviations from the supposed uniformity in the physical characters of the American aborigines" p. 379. Considerable deviations certainly, but no more than what many other travellers have recorded, and therefore all warning us how we give heed to those who have too hastily ascribed to them what Dr. Prichard has here called the supposed uniformity. Sir Alexander Mackenzie himself was struck by the difference, which he remarked between the Chapeyans and the tribes of the Algonquin race among whom he had before travelled, and he thinks that the former were an Asiatic or Siberian people. He says "their progress is easterly and according to their own traditions they came from Siberia, agreeing in dress and manners with the eastern Asiatics. They have a tradition among them that they came originally from another country, inhabited by very wicked people, (the usual legend among exiles driven away from their own homes,) and had traversed a great lake which was narrow, shallow and full of islands, where they had suffered great misery, it being always winter with ice and deep snow. (This coincides of course with the passage by the Aleutian islands.) The next great family of nations in America has been latterly recognized as one under a variety not only of local, but also of general names as Algonquin and Delawares. One of their tribes, the Lenni Lenape, "who look on themselves as the patriarchal stem of this race" says Dr. Prichard, "have traditions, which appear to the best informed persons to be