If America be the oldest continent, paleontologically speaking, as Agassiz tells us, there appears to be some reason for looking to it as the spot where early traces of the race are to be found, and the fact would seem to warrant further study and investigation in connection with the indigenous people of our continent, thereby awakening new sources of inquiry among ethnologists. LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES. The sienite plummet from San Joaquin Valley, California, goes back to the distant age of the Drift; and the Calaveras skull, admitting its authenticity, goes back to the Pliocene epoch, and is older than the relics or stone implements from the drift gravel and the European caves. It is doubtful, though, whether these data enable us to make generalizations equal in value to those afforded by the study of vocabularies. It is alleged that linguistic affinities exist between some of the tribes of the American coast and our Oriental neighbors across the Pacific. Mr. Brooks, whom I have already quoted, reports that in March, 1860, he took an Indian boy on board the Japanese steam corvette _Kanrin-maru_, where a comparison of Coast-Indian and pure Japanese was made at his request by Funkuzawa Ukitchy, then Admiral's secretary; the result of which he prepared for the press and published with a view to suggesting further linguistic investigations. He says that quite an infusion of Japanese words is found among some of the Coast tribes of Oregon and California, either pure or clipped, along with some very peculiar Japanese "idioms, constructions, honorific, separative, and agglutinative particles"; that shipwrecked Japanese are invariably enabled to communicate understandingly with the Coast Indians, although speaking quite a different language, and that many shipwrecked Japanese have informed him that they were enabled to communicate with and understand the natives of Atka and Adakh islands of the Aleutian group. With a view to finding out whether any linguistic affinity existed between Japanese and the Eskimo dialects in the vicinity of Bering straits, I caused several Japanese boys, employed as servants on board the _Corwin_, to talk on numerous occasions to the natives both of the American and Asiatic coasts; but in every instance they were unable to understand the Eskimo, and assured me that they could not detect a single word that bore any resemblance to words in their own language.