Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/70

64 the first monarch of universal history, the Egyptian Menes, the Indian Menu, the Greek Minos, the Phrygian Manis, the Lydian Macon, the German Mannus, the Welsh Menev, the Chinese Ming-ti, and the Algonquin Maniton" — and so on through endless ingenuities. Is not this comparative philology playing at "high jinks"? and is it not one more striking proof that to trust to language alone in questions of ethnography is to trust to a chain of sand?

While the Baron de Bretton's paper on the origins of the peoples of America contains some suggestions of value, it also, like the one just mentioned, is disfigured by many etymological fantasies. It is quite legitimate to try to show that America may have been in part peopled from Europe, but to base such a theory on arguments like the following makes one almost despair of the progress of scientific method: "The first invaders from whom, according to the tradition of the Toltecs, that people were descended, were called Tans, Dans (Danes!). Their god, Teoti, strongly resembles linguistically the Greek theos, Latin deus," etc. The temples of this god were called tescabli, "a word which comes from Greek theos and Celtic ca-cas, house," A god, Votan, is probably Wodin, and Thara, Thor-as Asa-thor. Azlan, the supposed original home of the Aztecs, is, according to Baron de Bretton, evidently Scandinavian Asaland, country of the Ases, of the Asiatics, of the Aztecs themselves. What answer can be made to such etymological legerdemain?

The Abbé Petitot has been for many years a zealous missionary in the Athabasca-Mackenzie region of North America, and has made some valuable contributions to a knowledge of the geography of that region; not content with this, however, he is eager through the medium of language to prove the unity of origin of the human race. He argues that because certain North American Indian words have a more or less distant resemblance to Chinese, Malay, Tamul, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Japanese, German, English, etc., therefore all these are descended from one common stock. We shall give only one specimen of the abbé's easy-going comparisons: English each, he tells us, is the same word as Hebrew isch. He gives pages of this sort of thing. It is easily done; any ignoramus with the dictionary of a dozen different languages before him could do it. The "Tower of Babel" is the abbé's starting-point in tracing the diversities of human speech.

It seems to us a pity that the reputation of an international congress that might do much good should be endangered by puerilities such as those we have referred to. We hope that in this their first meeting the froth has come to the surface, and that in future meetings means will be taken to prevent middle-age word-puzzles being foisted on the congress.

The two volumes, however, contain some papers of real value; these we have space only to name. Prof. Luciano Cordeiro's (or Coimbra) paper on the part taken by the Portuguese in the discovery of America is of considerable interest, and shows great research. A paper by M. Paul Broca on two series of crania from ancient Indian sepulchres in the neighborhood of Bogota is a model of careful observation and reasoning. M. J. Ballet, of Guadaloupe, has a long memoir on the Caribs, full of information. A paper by M. Julien Vinson on the Basque language and the American languages is able and scholarly and cautious. He shows that in structure and grammar they have many points of resemblance, but that on this ground there is no reason whatever for concluding that they or their speakers have a common origin. Other papers of value are Dr. Cornilliac's on the anthropology of the Antilles, Mr. Francis A. Allen's on the origin of the primitive civilization of the New World, an elaborate paper, the result of great research, and M. Oscar Cometrant's paper on music in America before the discovery of Columbus.

On the whole, we cannot think that these two volumes show that this International Congress of Americanists has done much in furtherance of the object for which it met, and we shall look with interest for the results of the second congress, which will meet at Luxembourg in September, 1877.