riginal home in
Asia. This is, of course, perfectly true, since nearly all the peoples
of Europe can be traced by descent from the original stock of the Aryan
family, which certainly made such a migration. But we know also that
races of men were dwelling in Europe ages before the Aryan migration.
What particular part of the globe was the first home of mankind is a
question on which we can only speculate.

Of one thing we may be certain. If there was a migration, there must
have been long ages of separation between mankind in America and
mankind in the Old World; otherwise we should still find some trace of
kinship in language which would join the natives of America to the
great racial families of Europe, Asia, and Africa. But not the
slightest vestige of such kinship has yet been found. Everybody knows
in a general way how the prehistoric relationships among the peoples of
Europe and Asia are still to be seen in the languages of to-day. The
French and Italian languages are so alike that, if we did not know it
already, we could easily guess for them a common origin. We speak of
these languages, along with others, as Romance languages, to show that
they are derived from Latin, in contrast with the closely related
tongues of the English, Dutch, and German peoples, which came from
another common stock, the Teutonic. But even the Teutonic and the
Romance languages are not entirely different. The similarity in both
groups of old root words, like the numbers from one to ten, point again
to a common origin still more remote. In this way we may trace a whole
family of languages, and with it a kinship of descent, from Hindustan
to Ireland. Similarly, another great group of tongues--Arabic, Hebrew,
etc.--shows a branch of the human family spread out from Palestine and
Egypt to Morocco.

Now when we come to inquire into the languages of the American Indians
for evidence of their relationship to other peoples we are struck with
this fact: we cannot connect the languages of America with those of any
other part of the world. This is a very notable circumstance. The
languages of Europe and Asia are, as it were, dovetailed together, and
run far and wide into Africa. From Asia eastward, through the Malay
tongues, a connection may be traced even with the speech of the Maori
of New Zealand, and with that of the remotest islanders of the Pacific.
But similar attempts to connect American languages with the outside
world break down. There a