Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/369

IX.] of the Spanish discovery and conquest, were the seat of empires possessing an organized system of government, with national creeds and institutions, with modes of writing and styles of architecture, and other appliances of a considerably developed culture, of indigenous origin. Such relics, too, as the great mounds which are scattered so widely through our western country, and the ancient workings upon the veins and ledges of native copper along the southern shore of Lake Superior, show that other large portions of the northern continent had not always been in the same savage condition as that in which our ancestors found them. Yet these were exceptions only, not changing the general rule; and there is reason to believe that, as the civilization of the Mississippi valley had been extinguished by the incursion and conquest of more barbarous tribes, so a similar fate was threatening that of the southern peoples: that, in fact, American culture was on its way to destruction even without European interference, as European culture for a time had seemed to be, during the Dark Ages which attended the downfall of the Roman empire. If the differentiation of American language has been thus unchecked by the influence of culture, it has been also favoured by the influence of the variety of climate and mode of life. While the other great families occupy, for the most part, one region or one zone, the American tribes have been exposed to all the difference of circumstances which can find place between the Arctic and the Antarctic oceans, amid ice-fields, mountains, valleys, on dry table-lands and in reeking river-basins, along shores of every clime. Moreover, these languages have shown themselves to possess a peculiar mobility and changeableness of material. There are groups of kindred tribes whose separation is known to be of not very long standing, but in whose speech the correspondences are almost overwhelmed and hidden from sight by the discordances which have sprung up. In more than one tongue it has been remarked that books of instruction prepared by missionaries have become antiquated and almost unintelligible in three or four generations. Add to all this, that our knowledge of the family begins in the most recent period, less than four hundred years