In America we are confronted with an astonishing multiplicity of linguistic stocks. They have been placed at about eighty in North and one hundred in South America. It is stated that there are that many radically diverse in elements and structure. To appreciate the vista in time that this fact opens to our thoughts, we must recognize the tenacity of life manifested by these tongues. Some of them have scores of dialects, spoken by tribes wandering over the widest areas. Take the Athapascan or Tinné, for example, found in its greatest purity amid the tribes who dwell on the Arctic sea, and along the Mackenzie river, in British America, but which is also the tongue of the Apaches who carried it almost to the valley of Mexico. The Algonkin was spoken from Hudson Bay to the Savannah river and from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains. The Guarani of the Rio de la Plata underlies dialects which were current as far north as Florida. How, then, in spite of such tenacity of American languages, have so many stocks come into existence? This was the question which my predecessor in this chair last year undertook to answer. His suggestions appear to me extremely valuable, and only in one point do I widely differ from him, and that is, in the length of time required for these numerous tongues to originate, to sever into dialects and to be carried to distant regions.[21] According to the able linguist, Dr. Stoll, the difference which is presented between the Cakchiquel and Maya dialects could not have arisen in less than two thousand years;[22] and any one who has carefully compared the earliest grammars of an American tongue with its present condition will acknowledge that the changes are surprisingly few. To me the exceeding diversity of languages in America and the many dialects into which these have split, are cogent proofs of the vast antiquity of the race, an antiquity stretching back tens of thousands of years. Nothing less can explain these multitudinous forms of speech. Underlying all these varied forms of expression, however, I think future investigation will demonstrate some curious identities of internal form, traits almost or entirely peculiar to American languages, and never quite absent from any of them. Such was the opinion of the two earliest philosophical investigators of these tongues, P. S. Duponceau and Wilhelm von Humboldt. They called these traits _polysynthesis_ and _incorporation_, and it was proposed to apply the term _incorporative_ as a distinguishing adjective to all American languages. Of late years this opinion has been earnestly combatted by M. Lucien Adam and others; but my own studies have led me to adopt the views of the older analysts against these modern critics. I do not think that the student can compare any two stocks on the continent without being impressed with the resemblance of their expression of the relations of Being, through the incorporative plan.