method of calculation leads to the decimal system, which is found in Aleoute. Many races, who long tarried at the notion of three, have wandered into complexities of the duodecimal system. M. Henry makes a very just observation about the interminable words of the Esquimaux, which may, I think, be applied also to many cases of American polysynthetism. They are, he says, phrases in which the words are abbreviated by the rapidity of pronunciation, as in the French phrases Qu'est ce qu'il dit, pronounced keskidi; Qu'est ce que c'est que cela, pronounced kekcèxça. Okalluktueksarsekautit, for okalluktuek-sakharsek-autit, "thou hast experienced many things worthy of memory."

To the south-east of the Esquimaux lie two confederations of Red Indians, the Algonquins and the Iroquois, whose numerous tribes furnished Cooper with most of his heroes, cruel, subtle, brave, magnanimous, and sententious. Compared with the Esquimaux these people are handsome, well-made, active, picturesquely clothed, their skin of a beautiful Florentine bronze under their family blazon and their variegated painting. More favoured by climate, they are less dirty and less greedy, but they have not passed the moral and intellectual level of those whom they formerly drove out of their territory; it is even doubted whether their most adaptable tribes can learn, like the Greenlanders, to take part in political and municipal life. Among them agriculture was abandoned to the women, and was rare and rudimentary; they lived only for and by hunting, always at war with their neighbours, in order to extend their domain as they killed out the game. Their religious ideas and practices, dances, songs, and exorcisms are pretty much the same, at bottom, as we find among civilised as among savage

peoples. It is one of the great benefits of ethnography that it has shown us over all the earth the equivalence of the genuflexions, the mummeries, and the beliefs called consoling or sublime. So Iroquois, Algonquins, or Esquimaux of the five parts of the world believe alike in the intervention, always capricious, often malign, of spirits or of gods, in the power of certain clever seers, well-paid interpreters of the will of those above or below; and, finally, in a second life in happy huntinggrounds which more than one has visited in dreams, and where the creatures come to be killed by the weapons which have been buried in the tombs of the warriors.

The Iroquois or Hurons of the lakes were divided into six nations, speaking Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora. The Algonquins, far more numerous, included about thirty tribes and as many dialects, related to each other by grammar and vocabulary; in Canada proper: Algonquin, Chippeway, Ottaway, Menomeni, Knistemaux; in Acadia: Souriquois, Micmac, Etchemin, Abenaki, &c.; in the States of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Georgia: Narragansett, Mohican, and Lenape, Miami, Saki, &c. The simple phonetic system of these languages presents no remarkable peculiarities except perhaps a sort of labial sibilant w, wdanis, his daughter, in Lenape, but oudanis in Ottaway.

The verb and the noun, as in many agglutinative languages, are not distinguished; the verb is only a noun accompanied by suffixes which mark possession. The pseudo-conjugation is none the less very rich in forms, in variants, though not in moods and tenses. An English missionary, Edwin James, fancied that he could attribute seven or eight thousand to the Chippe

way verb, but his eyes must have deceived him at that moment. The possessive pronoun and the first adjective are prefixed to the noun; kuligatchis, thy pretty little foot (ki, thou; wulit, pretty; wichgat, foot; chis, diminutive); kitanittowit, the Great Spirit (kitamanitou); wit is an adjective termination.

Algonquin has no genders; Iroquois has two, the one for gods and men, the other for everything else, women and children, animals, plants, or mountains. Yet there are particles and affixes to distinguish animate and inanimate. The vocabulary is poor in abstract terms, and even with the aid of borrowed words from English, Spanish, French, or German, the orator is condemned to have recourse to the strange metaphors which travellers have remarked with admiration without always understanding them.

Iroquois is strongest in numeration; it has separate words for the first ten numbers. The Algonquin, like the Esquimaux of Hudson's Bay, stops short at five; but as he calls ten five more, a hundred ten times ten, and a thousand the great ten of tens, it will be seen that he is fairly well endowed with the arithmetical faculty. An Iroquois manuscript is said to exist; it would be important to know its date. The missionaries were the first Iroquois and Algonquin litterateurs, and poor ones at the present day the Cherokees, who appear to accept civilisation, publish newspapers. But all these tribes, in spite of the relative gentleness of the Canadian immigrants, will disappear, either by the intermixture of their race with others, or destroyed by drink, before they have learned to submit to regular work and to social servitude.

It was, however, from their borders, perhaps even from one of their groups, that the mound-builders

started to go down the valleys of the Mississippi and the Ohio, and their tombs testify to a certain degree of industrial civilisation. Mingling with the Natchez, the Pawnees, and the Comanches, they invaded in successive waves the plateau of Anahuac, the Olmecs, Toltecs, Chichimecs, and Aztecs, whose different features, monuments, and religions we are now beginning to distinguish. These conquerors from the north encountered in Yucatan, in Chiapas, in Guatemala, and in the Isthmus, the Mayas and the Quiches, the builders of Izamal and of Pallanque, who had perhaps come from the north before them, or perhaps from Columbia, where the Chibchas already formed a theocratic state, with four kings and two popes. The brilliant Aztec empire overthrown by Cortez was not very ancient; but it is certain that for some centuries a considerable civilisation had existed in these regions, which were full of opulent cities and majestic monuments. For my part, I have not yet been able to admire in themselves the hideous carvings of the Mexican temples, yet they are tolerable from the decorative point of view. These were the dwelling-places of innumerable gods—of the air, of the spring, of fire, of lightning, of the sun-whom a sincere piety worshipped with human sacrifice. To-day the poor peons of the pueblos, although they retain a vague memory of Montezuma and their past grandeur, genuflect before other gods, who have also drunk deep of the blood of the vanquished. The god of the Inquisitors was a worthy successor to the fierce Huitzilopochtli. But though the people of the Anahuac were terribly oppressed in the sixteenth century, they are gradually recovering their place in humanity, and through the mixture of races are again taking their place in civilised life. The Christian zeal of the Spaniards destroyed the cities, the arts, the inscrip

tions, and the books of Mexico, except, if it be authentic, the Popul-vuh, a puerile rhapsody on cosmogony. But the results of scientific study of the various ethnic strata and of the thousand languages which are heaped up in these districts are full of interest. According to the fine work of M. V. A. Malte Brun (1877), there are, in an area only four times the size of France, not less than 280 dialects, classed in eleven great families, which comprehend thirty-five idioms and sixty-nine principal dialects, besides sixteen languages not classed, and sixty-two lost idioms. Most of these eleven families are still extant sporadically among the peoples of the centre, but overshadowed by Nahuatl or Mexican, which is spoken as far as the Isthmus. The oldest authentic Mexican text is a catechism printed at Antwerp in 1558.

On the other side of the equator, on the slopes of the Andes, another purely American civilisation had been formed, completely separated from Central America, the civilisation of the Quechuas and of the Aymaras, the vast empire of the Incas, theocratic and communistic (to the profit of the kings, children of the Sun), with its harems, its towns, divided into four quarters by walls at right angles, its grandiose festivities, its mystic cake and liqueur, its legends, in which a little history was mixed with a good deal of self-adulatory fiction. The great originality of ancient Peru was this state communism, unknown elsewhere, this paternal exploitation of happy serfs, lodged, fed, and married, at the expense and for the benefit of one man. Quichua or Ketchua, the principal language of the Pacific coast and of the valleys of the Andes, seems to have come originally from Quito, from the upper basin of the Amazon; one dialect, Tchintchaysouya, occupies the centre of Peru; a second, Cuzco, is spoken in the