et only left the way open to the most widely
divergent suppositions. For all that known dialects prove to the
contrary, on the one hand, there may have been one primitive language,
from which the descendant languages have varied so widely, that neither
their words nor their formation now indicate their unity in long past
ages, while, on the other hand, the primitive tongues of mankind may
have been numerous, and the extreme unlikeness of such languages as
Basque, Chinese, Peruvian, Hottentot and Sanskrit may arise from
absolute independence of origin.

The language spoken by any tribe or nation is not of itself absolute
evidence as to its race-affinities. This is clearly shown in extreme
cases. Thus the Jews in Europe have almost lost the use of Hebrew, but
speak as their vernacular the language of their adopted nation, whatever
it may be; even the Jewish-German dialect, though consisting so largely
of Hebrew words, is philologically German, as any sentence shows: "_Ich
hab noch hoiom lo geachelt_," "I have not yet eaten to-day." The mixture
of the Israelites in Europe by marriage with other nations is probably
much greater than is acknowledged by them; yet, on the whole, the race
has been preserved with extraordinary strictness, as its physical
characteristics sufficiently show. Language thus here fails
conspicuously as a test of race and even of national history. Not much
less conclusive is the case of the predominantly Negro populations of
the West India Islands, who, nevertheless, speak as their native tongues
dialects of English or French, in which the number of intermingled
native African words is very scanty: "_Dem hitti netti na ini watra
bikasi dem de fisiman_," "They cast a net into the water, because they
were fishermen." (Surinam Negro-Eng.) "_Bef pas ca jamain lasse poter
cones li_," "Le boeuf n'est jamais las de porter ses cornes." (Haitian
Negro-Fr.) If it be objected that the linguistic conditions of these two
races are more artificial than has been usual in the history of the
world, less extreme cases may be seen in countries where the ordinary
results of conquest-colonization have taken place. The Mestizos, who
form so large a fraction of the population of modern Mexico, numbering
several millions, afford a convenient test in this respect, inasmuch as
their intermediate complexion separates them from both their ancestral
races, the Spaniard, and the chocolate-brown indigenous Aztec or other
Mexican. Th