Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/173

Rh is not peculiar to America, but appears in Southeast Asia, as for instance in the Kol languages of Bengal. In that Asiatic district also appears the habit of infixing, that is, of modifying roots or words by the insertion of a letter or syllable, somewhat as the Dakota language inserts a pronoun within the verb-root itself, or as that remarkable language, the Choctaw, alters its verbs by insertions of a still more violent character. Again, the distinction between the inclusive and exclusive pronoun we, according as it means "you and I" or "they and I," etc. (the want of which is perhaps a defect in English), is as familiar to the Maori as to the Ojibway. Whether the languages of the American tribes be regarded as derived from Asia or as separate developments, their long existence on the American Continent seems unquestionable. Had they been the tongues of tribes come within a short time by Behring Strait, we should have expected them to show clear connection with the tongues of their kindred left behind in Asia, just as the Lapp in Europe, whose ancestors have been separated for thousands of years from the ancestors of the Ostiak or the Turk, still shows in his speech the traces of their remote kinship. The problem how tribes so similar in physical type and culture as the Algonquins, Iroquois, Sioux, and Athapascans, should adjoin one another, yet speaking languages so separate, is only soluble by influences which have had a long period of time to work in.

The comparison of peoples according to their social framework of family and tribe has been assuming more and more importance since it was brought forward by Bachofen, McLennan, and Morgan. One of its broadest distinctions comes into view within the Dominion of Canada. The Esquimaux are patriarchal, the father being head of the family, and descent and inheritance following the male line. But the Indian tribes farther south are largely matriarchal, reckoning descent not on the father's but the mother's side. In fact, it was through becoming an adopted Iroquois that Morgan became aware of this system, so foreign to European ideas, and which he supposed at first to be an isolated peculiarity. No less a person than Herodotus had fallen into the same mistake over two thousand years ago, when he thought the Lykians, in taking their names from their mothers, were unlike all other men. It is now, however, an accepted matter of anthropology, that in Herodotus's time nations of the civilized world had passed through this matriarchal stage, as appears from the survivals of it retained in the midst of their newer patriarchal institutions. For instance, among the Arabs to this day, strongly patriarchal as their society is in most respects, there survives that most matriarchal idea that one's nearest relative is not one's father but one's maternal uncle; he is bound to his sister's children by a "closer and holier tie" than paternity, as Tacitus says of the same conception among the ancient Germans. Obviously great interest attaches to any accounts of existing tribes which preserve for us the explanation of such social