istant age of the Drift; and the Calaveras skull, admitting its
authenticity, goes back to the Pliocene epoch, and is older than the
relics or stone implements from the drift gravel and the European caves.

It is doubtful, though, whether these data enable us to make
generalizations equal in value to those afforded by the study of
vocabularies. It is alleged that linguistic affinities exist between
some of the tribes of the American coast and our Oriental neighbors
across the Pacific. Mr. Brooks, whom I have already quoted, reports that
in March, 1860, he took an Indian boy on board the Japanese steam
corvette _Kanrin-maru_, where a comparison of Coast-Indian and pure
Japanese was made at his request by Funkuzawa Ukitchy, then Admiral's
secretary; the result of which he prepared for the press and published
with a view to suggesting further linguistic investigations. He says
that quite an infusion of Japanese words is found among some of the
Coast tribes of Oregon and California, either pure or clipped, along
with some very peculiar Japanese "idioms, constructions, honorific,
separative, and agglutinative particles"; that shipwrecked Japanese are
invariably enabled to communicate understandingly with the Coast
Indians, although speaking quite a different language, and that many
shipwrecked Japanese have informed him that they were enabled to
communicate with and understand the natives of Atka and Adakh islands of
the Aleutian group.

With a view to finding out whether any linguistic affinity existed
between Japanese and the Eskimo dialects in the vicinity of Bering
straits, I caused several Japanese boys, employed as servants on board
the _Corwin_, to talk on numerous occasions to the natives both of the
American and Asiatic coasts; but in every instance they were unable to
understand the Eskimo, and assured me that they could not detect a
single word that bore any resemblance to words in their own language.

The study of the linguistic peculiarities which distinguish the
population around Bering straits offers an untrodden path in a new
field; but it is doubtful whether the results, except to linguists like
Cardinal Mezzofanti, or philologists of the Max Mueller type, would be at
all commensurate with the efforts expended in this direction, since it
is asserted that the human voice is incapable of articulating more than
twenty distinct sounds, therefore whatever resemblances there may be in
the particular words of dif