y found that this dictionary had become
antiquated and useless. Old words had sunk to the ground, and new ones had
risen to the surface; and to all outward appearance the language was
completely changed.

Nothing surprised the Jesuit missionaries so much as the immense number of
languages spoken by the natives of America. But this, far from being a
proof of a high state of civilization, rather showed that the various
races of America had never submitted, for any length of time, to a
powerful political concentration, and that they had never succeeded in
founding great national empires. Hervas reduces, indeed, all the dialects
of America to eleven families(45)--four for the south, and seven for the
north; but this could be done only by the same careful and minute
comparison which enables us to class the idioms spoken in Iceland and
Ceylon as cognate dialects. For practical purposes the dialects of America
are distinct dialects, and the people who speak them are mutually
unintelligible.

We hear the same observations everywhere where the rank growth of dialects
has been watched by intelligent observers. If we turn our eyes to Burmah,
we find that there the Burmese has produced a considerable literature, and
is the recognized medium of communication not only in Burmah, but likewise
in Pegu and Arakan. But the intricate mountain ranges of the peninsula of
the Irawaddy(46) afford a safe refuge to many independent tribes, speaking
their own independent dialects; and in the neighborhood of Manipura alone
Captain Gordon collected no less than twelve dialects. "Some of them," he
says, "are spoken by no more than thirty or forty families, yet so
different from the rest as to be unintelligible to the nearest
neighborhood." Brown, the excellent American missionary, who has spent his
whole life in preaching the Gospel in that part of the world, tells us
that some tribes who left their native village to settle in another
valley, became unintelligible to their forefathers in two or three
generations.(47)

In the north of Asia the Ostiakes, as Messerschmidt informs us, though
really speaking the same language everywhere, have produced so many words
and forms peculiar to each tribe, that even within the limits of twelve or
twenty German miles, communication among them becomes extremely difficult.
Castren, the heroic explorer of the languages of northern and central
Asia,(48) assures us that some of the Mongolian dialects are actually