Its forms are rich, regular, and methodical, closely following the analogy of the ideas which they are intended to express; compounded, but not confused; occasionally elliptical in their mode of expression, but not more so than the languages of Europe, and much less so than those of a large group of nations on the eastern coast of Asia. The terminations of their verbs, expressive of number, person, time, and other modifications of action and passion, while they are richer in their extension than those of the Latin and Greek, which we call emphatically the _learned_ languages, appear to have been formed on a similar but enlarged model, without other aid than that which was afforded by nature operating upon the intellectual faculties of man.”[3] At the same time it is no less important to note the limited range of vocabulary in many of the American languages. Those characteristics, taken along with their peculiar holophrastic power of inflecting complex word-sentences, and expressing by their means delicate shades of meaning, exhibit the phenomena of human speech in some of their most remarkable phases. But the range of the vocabularies furnishes a true gauge of the intellectual development of the Indian: incapable of abstract idealism, realising few generic relations, and multiplying words by comparisons and descriptive compounds. To whatever cause we attribute such phenomena, much is gained by being able to study them apart from the complex derivative elements which trammel the study of European philology. Assuming for our present argument the unity of the human race, not in the ambiguous sense of a common typical structure, but literally, as descendants of one stock: in the primitive scattering of infant nations, the Mongol and the American went eastward, while the Indo-European began his still uncompleted wanderings towards the far west. The Mongol and the Indo-European have repeatedly met and mingled. They now share, unequally, the Indian peninsula and the continent of Europe. But the American and the Indo-European only met after an interval measurable by thousands of years, coming from opposite directions, and having made the circuit of the globe.