Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/373

IX.] ; and the Pacific coast was occupied by a medley of tribes. Mexico and Central America, finally, were the home of a great variety of tongues, that of the cultivated Aztecs, with its kindred, having the widest range.

The linguistic condition of America, and the state of our knowledge respecting it, being such as we have here seen, it is evident how futile must be at present any attempt to prove by the evidence of language the peopling of the continent from Asia, or from any other part of the world outside. We have already noticed that a relationship is asserted to exist between the Eskimo branch of American language and a dialect or two in the extreme north-east of Asia; but the fact that it is a specifically Eskimo relationship is sufficient to prove its worthlessness as a help to the explanation of the origin of American language in general, and to make it probable that the communication there has been from America to Asia, and not the contrary. To enter upon a bare and direct comparison of modern American with modern Asiatic dialects, for the purpose of discovering signs of genetic connection between them, would be a proceeding utterly at variance with all the principles of linguistic science, and could lead to no results possessing any significance or value. One might as well compare together the English, the modern Syriac, and the Hungarian, in order to determine the ultimate relationship of the Indo-European, Semitic, and Scythian families. Sound method (as was pointed out in the sixth lecture  ) requires that we study each dialect, group, branch, and family by itself, before we venture to examine and pronounce upon its more distant connections. What we have to do at present, then, is simply to learn all that we possibly can of the Indian languages themselves; to settle their internal relations, elicit their laws of growth, reconstruct their older forms, and ascend toward their original condition as far as the material within our reach, and the state in which it is presented, will allow; if our studies shall at length put us in a position to deal with the question of their Asiatic derivation, we will rejoice at it. I do not myself expect that valuable light will ever be shed upon the subject by linguistic evidence: others may be more