From the wandering hordes of the great Asiatic steppes have come the Huns, the Magyars, and the Turks, as well as a considerable portion of the Bulgarians of modern Europe; while the sterile peninsula of Arabia has given birth to moral revolutions of the most enduring influence. Yet the capacity for civilisation of the Magyar or the Turk, transferred to new physical conditions, and subjected to higher moral and intellectual influences; or the wondrous intellectual vigour of the Arab of Bagdad or Cordova: affords no scale by which to gauge the immobility of the Tartar on his native steppe, or the Arab in his desert wilderness. Without agriculture or any idea of property in land, destitute of the very rudiments of architecture, knowing no written law, or any form of government save the patriarchal expansion to the tribe of the primitive family ties: we can discern no change in the wild nomad, though we trace him back for three thousand years. Migratory offshoots of the hordes of Central Asia, and of the wanderers of the Arabian desert, have gone forth to prove the capacity for progress of the least progressive races; but the great body tarries still in the wilderness and on the steppe, to prove what an enduring capacity man also has to live as one of the wild fauna of the waste. The Indians of the New World, whencesoever they derived their origin, present to us just such a type of unprogressive life as the nomads of the Asiatic steppe. The Red-Man of the North-West exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century; and for aught that appears in him of a capacity for development, the forests of the American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of buffaloes, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean-bed. That he is no recent intruder is indisputably proved alike by physical and intellectual evidence. On any theory of human origin, the blended gradations of America’s widely diversified indigenous races, demand a lengthened period for their development; and equally, on any theory of the origin of languages, must time be prolonged to admit of the multiplication of mutually unintelligible dialects and tongues in the New World. It is estimated that there are nearly six hundred languages, and dialects matured into independent tongues, in Europe. The known origin and growth of some of these may supply a standard whereby to gauge the time indicated by such a multiplication of tongues. But the languages of the American continents have been estimated to exceed twelve hundred and sixty, including agglutinate languages of peculiarly elaborate structure, and inflectional forms of complex development. Of the grammar of the Lenni-Lenapé Indians, Duponceau remarks: “It exhibits a language entirely the work of the children of nature, unaided by our arts and sciences, and, what is most remarkable, ignorant of the art of writing.