hes),
and symbolically the mother of the race (Nahuas), and the material from
which was moulded the first of men (Quiches).

As the races, so the great families of man who speak dialects of the
same tongue are, in a sense, individuals, bearing each its own
physiognomy. When the whites first heard the uncouth gutturals of the
Indians, they frequently proclaimed that hundreds of radically diverse
languages, invented, it was piously suggested, by the Devil for the
annoyance of missionaries, prevailed over the continent. Earnest
students of such matters--Vater, Duponceau, Gallatin, and
Buschmann--have, however, demonstrated that nine-tenths of the area of
America, at its discovery, were occupied by tribes using dialects
traceable to ten or a dozen primitive stems. The names of these, their
geographical position in the sixteenth century, and, so far as it is
safe to do so, their individual character, I shall briefly mention.

Fringing the shores of the Northern Ocean from Mount St. Elias on the
west to the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the east, rarely seen a hundred
miles from the coast, were the Eskimos.[23-1] They are the connecting
link between the races of the Old and New Worlds, in physical appearance
and mental traits more allied to the former, but in language betraying
their near kinship to the latter. An amphibious race, born fishermen, in
their buoyant skin kayaks they brave fearlessly the tempests, make long
voyages, and merit the sobriquet bestowed upon them by Von Baer, "the
Phenicians of the north." Contrary to what one might suppose, they are,
amid their snows, a contented, light-hearted people, knowing no longing
for a sunnier clime, given to song, music, and merry tales. They are
cunning handicraftsmen to a degree, but withal wholly ingulfed in a
sensuous existence. The desperate struggle for life engrosses them, and
their mythology is barren.

South of them, extending in a broad band across the continent from
Hudson's Bay to the Pacific, and almost to the Great Lakes below, is the
Athapascan stock. Its affiliated tribes rove far north to the mouth of
the Mackenzie River, and wandering still more widely in an opposite
direction along both declivities of the Rocky Mountains, people portions
of the coast of Oregon south of the mouth of the Columbia, and spreading
over the plains of New Mexico under the names of Apaches, Navajos, and
Lipans, almost reach the tropics at the delta of the Rio Grande del
Norte, and on