The evidences of these opinions, it must be confessed, are as yet few in number. That the Libyan or Berber speech was once the language of all northern Africa has long been maintained by Ritter, Heeren and Shaler, and by Mr. Hodgson in his very interesting Letters from Algiers, during the period in which he held the United States consulate in that regency.[47] Prof. Ritter (whose work I have not seen) asserts that the Amazirgh, or Berber language, as detected by certain prefixes and affixes peculiar to it and the Coptic tongue, is to be found across the whole breadth of the continent, from the Red Sea to the Canary Isles; and he supposes, too, that the Hazorta tribes, like the old Bejas and modern Bishareens, were originally of the same parent stock. To these evidences we may add those of Prof Vater, who traced some affinity between the Berber and the Coptic and Amharic, but not sufficient to lead to satisfactory results. I have before me an obliging communication from Mr. Hodgson, in which he informs me, that he also discovered what he believed to be incontrovertible evidence of the Berber origin of the Bishareen language, before he had read the work of Prof. Ritter; and in an essay just published on the Foulahs of central Africa, he reiterates the opinion early expressed by him, that the Berber or Libyan tongue was spoken in the valley of the Nile, prior to the existence of the Coptic or monumental language; a theory which, he further remarks, is in accordance with the nature of things and the probable course of events. “Whilst the positive records of modern history,” observes Mr. Hodgson, “show that the Coptic tongue has been obliterated from the map of Egypt within the short period which has elapsed since the Saracenic invasion, need we wonder that so few traces remain of the language of that country in primeval and unrecorded times? These vestiges, however, have been detected by me, and, I think, with a strong degree of probability, in the mythologic and geographical names transmitted to us from the earliest periods of Egyptian history. The meaning of Ammon, Thebes, Themis, and Nile, and of Heliopolis (Tadij) and Apollinopolis (Etfu) have been explained from the modern Berber language; and the very name of _Hykshos_, who were called shepherds, means also shepherds in Berber.[48] “These etymologies serve, at least, as tokens of the existence of the Libyans in the valley of the Nile, at a period anterior to that of the monumental Egyptians. I have, also, found grammatical affinities between the Coptic and the Berber, which suggest that the monosyllabic elements of the former have been imposed upon the Berber syntax, and, therefore, that the Coptic is posterior in nationality to the Berber.”