Sci._ vol. xxxviii., 1889, pp. 287-331). The whole subject
has been discussed by Professor H. W. Henshaw in his "Popular
Fallacies respecting the Indians" (_Amer. Anthrop._ vol. vii. n.s.,
1905, pp. 104-113).
Linguistic stocks.
Of ways of classifying the races of mankind and their subdivisions the
number is great, but that which measures them by their speech is both
ancient and convenient. The multiplicity of languages among the American
Indians was one of the first things that struck the earliest
investigators of a scientific turn of mind, no less than the
missionaries who preceded them. The Abbé Hervas, the first serious
student of the primitive tongues of the New World, from the
classificatory point of view, noted this multiplicity of languages in
his _Catalogo delle lingue conosciute e notizia della loro affinità e
diversità_ (Cesena, 1784); and after him Balbi, Adelung and others.
About the same time in America Thomas Jefferson, who besides being a
statesman was also a considerable naturalist (see _Amer. Anthrop._ ix.
n.s., 1907, 499-509), was impressed by the same fact, and in his _Notes
on the State of Virginia_ observed that for one "radical language" in
Asia there would be found probably twenty in America. Jefferson himself
collected and arranged (the MSS. were afterwards lost) the vocabularies
of about fifty Indian languages and dialects, and so deserves rank among
the forerunners of the modern American school of comparative
philologists. After Jefferson came Albert Gallatin, who had been his
secretary of the treasury, as a student of American Indian languages in
the larger sense. He had also himself collected a number of Indian
vocabularies. Gallatin's work is embodied in the well-known "Synopsis of
the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains,
and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America," published
in the _Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian
Society_ (ii. 1-422) for 1836. In this, really the first attempt in
America to classify on a linguistic basis the chief Indian tribes of the
better-known regions of North America, Gallatin enumerated the following
twenty-nine separate divisions: Adaize, Algonkin-Lenape, Athapascas,
Atnas, Attacapas, Blackfeet, Caddoes, Catawbas, Chahtas, Cherokees,
Chetimachas, Chinooks, Eskimaux, Fall Indians, Iroquois, Kinai,
Koulischen, Muskhogee, Natches, Pawnees, Queen Charlotte's Island,
Salish, Salmon River (Friendly Village), Shoshonees, Sioux, Straits of
Fuca, Utchees, Wakash, Woccons. These do not all represent distinct
linguistic stocks, as may be seen by comparison with the list given
below; such peoples as the Caddo and Pawnee are now known to belong
together, the Blackfeet are Algonkian, the Catawba Siouan, the Adaize
Caddoan, the Natchez Muskogian, &c. But the monograph is a very good
first attempt at classifying North American Indian languages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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