within itself the idea of place and time. Thus arises a marvellous fertility of expression, and a wonderful precision ; and yet this very copiousness is a defect, springing from the want of reflection and analysis.

The same synthetic character appears in the formation of words. The noun receives into itself not only the affixed forms designating relation, but those also which express a quality. The noun and the adjective are, with the pronoun, blended into one word. The power of combination, common to every original language, is possessed in an unlimited degree; and, as a new object is presented to an Indian, he will inquire its use, and promptly give it a name, including within itself, perhaps, an entire definition. The Indian never kneels; so, when Eliot translated kneeling, the word which he was compelled to form fills a line, and numbers eleven syllables. As in early days books were written in unbroken lines without any division of the parts of a sentence, so the savage, in his speech, runs word into word, till at last a single one appears to include the whole proposition. By this process of aggregation, a simple root is often buried beneath its environments; rapidity of movement and grace are lost; and speech is encumbered with the expressive masses which it has heaped together. The words that enter into the compound are not melted into each other; nothing resembling a chemical affinity takes place; but the compound word is like patchwork; the masses that are joined together remain heterogeneous. The union resembles clumsy mechanism, where the contrivance lies bare, and forces itself upon the eye. The cultivated man, with select instruments, expresses every idea; the savage is for ever coining words; and the original character of his language permits him to multiply them at will.

Still more is the character of synthesis observable in the pronoun. That part of speech hardly existed in a separate form; at least, in a separate form, was rarely in use. Its principal office, in the Algonkin dialects, is to define the relations of the noun and the verb. The pronoun knows no distinction of genders for male and female; one form is common to both; another form is for the neuter, as in Latin

there is sometimes a common gender, in contradistinction to the neuter. Hence, as nouns are always used in connection with pronouns, there is in the form no distinction between masculine and feminine, but only between the form common to both genders on the one hand, and the form applied to the neuter on the other; in a word, between the animate and the inanimate. The plural of animate nouns appears to be formed by an amalgamation with the pronoun of the third person, and the plural of inanimate words by an amalgamation with the corresponding neuter pronoun.

The use of the pronoun is, therefore, to modify nouns and verbs. The ideas which we imply by case, with the exception of the possessive, are not ideas having relation to pronouns the Indian languages have, therefore, all the modifications of the noun that can come from the use of pronouns; but, with the exception of the genitive, as expressing possession, and marked, as in the Hebrew, by a pronominal affix, they have no series of cases. The rela tions of case are expressed by pronouns affixed to the verb.

The use of the adjective is in a still greater degree synthetical. There is no such separate word, in an Algonkin dialect, as a simple adjective. As the noun is used only in its relation, so the adjective is used with reference to that which it qualifies. Its form, when it stands alone, is that of an impersonal verb.

The peculiar economy of the American languages is best illustrated in their verbs. Though destitute of the substantive verb, of which feeble and uncertain traces only can be found in the Chippewa, and perhaps in the Muskohgee, and those only after the presence of Europeans, yet the verb is the dominant part of speech, swallowing up, as it were, and including within itself, the pronoun, the substantive, and the adjective. Declension, cases, articles, are deficient; but every thing is conjugated. The adjective assumes a verbal termination, and is conjugated as a verb; the idea expressed by a noun is clothed in verbal forms, and at once does the office of a verb.

Here, also, the synthetic character predominates. Does

an adjective assume a verbal form, it takes to itself also the person or thing which it qualifies; and the adjective, the pronoun representing the subject, and the verbal form, are included in one word. Thus far the American dialects have analogies with the Greek and Latin. But the American go farther. The accessory idea of case is represented in a form of the verb by means of a pronominal affix. An Algonkin, when he says I love or I hate, simultaneously, though, as Trumbull reasons, not necessarily, expresses the object of his love or hatred. As each noun is blended with a pronominal prefix, as each adjective amalgamates with the subject which it qualifies, so each active verb includes in one and the same word one pronoun representing its subject, and another representing its object. Nor does the synthetic tendency stop here. An adjective may first be melted into the substantive, and the compound word may then assume verbal forms, and receive all the changes, and include within itself all the relations, which those forms can express.

There are in the American dialects no genuine declensions; it is otherwise with conjugations. The verbs have true grammatical forms, as fixed and as regular as those of Greek or Sanscrit. The relations of number and person, both with regard to the agent and the object, are included in the verb by means of significant pronominal syllables, which are prefixed, inserted, or annexed. The relations of time are expressed by the insertion in part of unmeaning, in part, it may be, of significant, syllables; and, as many supplementary syllables may not always be easily piled one upon another, changes of consonants, as well as, in a slight degree, changes of vowels, and elisions take place; and sometimes unmeaning syllables are inserted for the sake of euphony. Inflection, agglutination, and euphonic changes, all take place in the conjugation of the Chippewa verb. Of varieties of terminations and forms, the oldest languages and those in the earliest stage of development have the

most.

But not only does the Algonkin verb admit the number of forms required for the diversity of time and mode;

it has numerous conjugations. An action may be often repeated, and a frequentative conjugation follows. The idea of causation, which the Indian does not express abstractly, but only synthetically, makes a demand, as in the Hebrew, for a new conjugation. Every verb may be used negatively as well as positively; it may include in itself an animate object, or the object may be inanimate; and whether it expresses a simple action, or, again, is a frequentative, it may have a reflex signification, like the middle voice of a Greek verb; and every one of these accidents gives birth to a series of new forms. Then, since the Indian verb includes within itself the agent and the object, it may pass through as many transitions as the persons and numbers of the pronouns will admit of different combinations; and each of these combinations may be used positively or negatively, with a reflex or a causative signification. In this manner, changes are so multiplied that the number of possible forms of a Chippewa verb is said to amount to five or six thousand in other words, the number of possible variations is indefinitely great.

Such are the cumbersome processes by which synthetical languages express thought. For the want of analysis, the savage obtains no mastery over the forms of his language; nay, the forms themselves are used in a manner which to us would seem anomalous, and to the Indian can appear regular only because his mind receives the complex thought without analysis. To a verb having a nominative singular and an accusative plural, a plural termination is often affixed. The verb, says Eliot, is thus changed to an adnoun. Again, if with a verb which is qualified by an adverb the idea of futurity is to be connected, the sign of futurity is attached promiscuously either to the verb or the adverb; the Indian is satisfied on finding the expression of futurity somewhere in the group.

From these investigations, two momentous conclusions follow. The grammatical forms which constitute the organization of a language are not the work of civilization, but of nature. It is not writers, nor arbitrary conventions, that give laws to language: the forms of grammar, the

power of combinations, the possibility of inversions, spring from within us, and are a consequence of our own organization. If language is a human invention, it was the invention of savage man; and this creation of barbarism would be a higher trophy to human power than any achievement of civilization. The study of these rudest dialects tends to prove, if it does not conclusively prove, that it was not man who made language, but He who made man gave him utterance. Speech in copiousness, and with abundance and regularity of forms, belongs to the American savage, because it belongs to man. From the country of the Esquimaux to the Oronoco, and from the burning climes on the borders of that stream to the ice of the Straits of Magellan, the primitive American languages, entirely differing in their roots, have, with slight exceptions, one and the same physiognomy. Remarkable analogies of grammatical structure pervade the most refined as well as the most gross. Idioms as unlike as Sclavonic and Celtic resemble each other in their internal mechanism. In the Esquimaux, there is an immense number of forms, derived from the regimen of pronouns. The same is true of the Basque language in Spain and of the Congo in Africa. Here is a marvellous coincidence in the structure of languages, at points so remote, among three races so different as the white man of the Pyrenees, the black man of Congo, and the copper-colored tribes of North America. Now a characteristic so extensive is to be accounted for only on some general principle. It pervades languages of different races and different continents: it must, then, be the result of law. As nature, when it rose from the chaos of its convulsions and its deluges, appeared with its mountains, its basins, and its valleys, all so fashioned that man could cultivate and adorn them, but not shape them anew at his will, so language, in its earliest period, has a fixed character, which culture, by weeding out superfluities, inventing happy connections, teaching the measure of ellipsis, and, through analysis, perfecting the mastery of the mind over its instruments, may polish, enliven, and improve, but cannot essentially change. Men have admired the magnificence displayed