ere
are monuments in those benignant latitudes of perpetual summer,
exempted as they are from the disintegrating effects of frosts, which
corroborate such a chronology, and denote even a more ancient
population, who were builders, agriculturists and worshippers of the
sun. But we require a far longer period than any thus denoted, to
account for those changes and subdivisions which have been found in the
American languages.

[9] Such are the traditions of the Aztecs and of the Athapascas.
Nearly every Aonic tribe, on the contrary, affirm that their
ancestors came out of the ground.

Language is itself so irrefragable a testimony of the mental affinities
of nations, and so slow in the periods of its mutations, that it offers
one of the most important means for studying the history of the people.
Grammars and vocabularies are required of all the tribes, whose history
and relations we seek to fathom, before we can successfully compare
them with each other, and with foreign languages. It is a study of high
interest, from the diversity and curious principles of the dialects.
There is a general agreement in the principles of Indian utterance,
while their vocabularies exhibit wide variances. Some of the concords
required, are anomalous to the occidental grammars, while there is a
manifest general resemblance to these ancient plans of thought. The
most curious features consist in the personal forms of the verbs, the
constant provision for limiting the action to specific objects, the
submergence of gender in many cases into two great organic and
inorganic classes of nature, marked by vitality or inertia, and the
extraordinary power of syllabical combination, by which Indian
lexicography is rendered so graphic and descriptive in the bestowal of
names. They are all, or nearly all, transpositive and polysynthetic;
yet although now found in a very concrete form, this appears to have
been not their original form, but rather the result of the progress of
syllabical accretion, from a few limited roots and particles, which are
yet when dissected found to be monosyllabic. That they have
incorporated some of the Hebrew pronouns, and while like this language,
wanting the auxiliary verb _to be_, have preserved its solemn causative
verb, for existence, are among the points of the philology to be
explained. But I have not time to pursue this subject. Even these
notices are made at the sacrifice of other and perhaps more gen