Professor Max Müller has drawn attention to the tendency of the languages of America towards an endless multiplication of distinct dialects. Those again have been grouped by the synthetic process of Hervas into eleven families: seven for the northern continent, and four for South America. But we are as yet only on the threshold of this important branch of research. In two papers contributed by M. Lucien Adam to the _Congrès International des Americanistes_, he gives the results of a careful examination of sixteen languages of North and South America; and arrives at the conclusion that they belong to a number of independent families as essentially distinct as they would have been “had there been primitively several human pairs.” Dr. Brinton, one of the highest authorities on any question connected with native American languages, contributed a paper to the _American Antiquarian_ (Jan. 1886), “On the Study of the Nahuatl Language.” This language, which is popularly known as Aztec, he strongly commends to the study of American philologists. It is one of the most completely organised of Indian languages, has a literature of considerable extent and variety, and is still in use by upwards of half a million of people. It is from this area, southward through Central America, and in the great seat of native South American civilisation, that we can alone hope to recover direct evidence of ancient intercourse between the Old and the New World. But, here again, the complexities of language seem to grow apace. In Dr. Brinton’s _Notes on the Mangue, an extinct Language formerly spoken in Nicaragua_, he states, as a result of his later studies, that the belief which he once entertained of some possible connection between this dialect and the Aymara of Peru, has not been confirmed on further examination. This, therefore, tends to sustain the prevailing opinion of scholars that there is no direct affiliation between the languages of North and South America. All this is suggestive either of an idea, such as that which Agassiz favoured in his system of natural provinces of the animal world, in relation to different types of man, on which he based the conclusion that the diverse varieties of American man originated in various centres, and had been distributed from them over the entire continent; or we must assume immigration from different foreign centres. Accepting the latter as the more tenable proposition, I long ago sketched a scheme of immigration such as seemed to harmonise with the suggestive, though imperfect evidence. This assumed the earliest current of population, in its progress from a supposed Asiatic cradleland, to have spread through the islands of the Pacific, and reached the South American continent before any excess of population had diffused itself into the inhospitable northern steppes of Asia. By an Atlantic oceanic migration, another wave of population occupied the Canaries, Madeiras,