In Polynesia the evidence thus offered by cultivated plants points to the spread of Asiatic culture eastward across the Pacific, while the peculiarities of the cultivated plants of America point to its isolation from all the rest of the world; an isolation which is further established by a radical dissimilarity of all American languages from Old World linguistic stocks. In no language of the New World, for example, is there a vestige of Hebrew, which would support the cherished theory of the migration to this continent of the lost tribes of Israel; nor is there a suggestion of any linguistic element to indicate connection with the Chinese, nor any relationship between the builders of the American pyramids and those of Egypt. There are many distinct groups of American languages. Very often the language of a tribe is quite unlike that of its nearest neighbors; while at the same time it may resemble the languages of tribes quite remote. This fact indicates former segregation of the various groups speaking the unlike languages and a common ancestry or close association of the tribes speaking the allied dialects. As examples, I might mention the Quichua Indians of Peru, whose language is very unlike the languages spoken by the Arawak and Carib Indians to their northward and, at the same time, quite distinct from the languages of their Brazilian neighbors to the eastward. The Aztecs of Mexico spoke a language differing radically in structure as well as in vocabulary from the Maya language of their Yucatan neighbors; yet there is unquestionably a relationship between the Aztecs and a number of very distant tribes, shown by resemblances of their languages, as in the case of the Shoshone Indians of the northern United States and the Nuhuatl tribes of Salvador and Costa Rica. In the same way, the Algonquian dialects, which differ greatly from those of the Iroquoian, show a close relationship between very widely scattered tribes in North America, from North Carolina to Quebec. Such resemblances and radical differences point to a very remote and long-continued segregation which permitted the independent formation of distinct linguistic stocks; while the antiquity of man in America, both north and south of the equator, is further attested by the development of such a cultivated and highly specialized food staple as maize, whose ancestral prototype we have sought in vain. Its endless varieties, fitted for widely diverse conditions of soil and climate, also point to a long period of cultivation in dissimilar culture-areas, which enabled them to adapt themselves to conditions very different from those of the original stock from which they sprang.