missionaries who had been in the New World supposed the number of languages, of which they had some notices in South America, to be five hundred. But the Abbé Royo, who had made diligent inquiries about the language of Peru, where he had dwelt, asserts that the whole people of America spoke not less than two thousand languages. The learned Francisco Lopez, a native of South America, who had extensive knowledge of that country as well as of the northern continent, a great part of which was traversed by the Jesuits, thought it no rash assertion to say that the idioms, 'notabilmente diversi,' of the whole country were not less than fifteen hundred." It is difficult to say what would have been the natural growth, in the way of opinion from these strong (and not much overstated) phænomena, as to the apparently radical differences between the languages in question if they had come down to the present generation of scholars in an unmodified and unqualified form. This, however, was not the case. A most important disturbing element was soon indicated, which I follow Prichard in ascribing to Vater. It was this--viz.: that different as may be the languages of America from each other, the discrepancy _extends to words or roots only, the general internal or grammatical structure being the same for all_. Of course this grammatical structure must, in and of itself, be stamped with some very remarkable characteristics. It must differ from those of the whole world. Its verbs must be different from other verbs, its substantives other than the substantives of Europe, its adjectives unlike the adjectives of Asia. It must be this, or something like this--otherwise its identity of character goes for nothing; inasmuch as a common grammatical structure in respect to common grammatical elements is nothing more than what occurs all the world over. At present it is enough to say, that such either was or appeared to be the case. "In Greenland,"[133] writes Vater, "as well as in Peru, on the Hudson river, in Massachusetts as well as in Mexico, and as far as the banks of the Orinoco, languages are spoken, displaying forms more artfully distinguished and more numerous than almost any other idioms in the world possess." "When we consider these artfully and laboriously contrived languages, which, though existing at points separated from each other by so many hundreds of miles, have assumed a character not less remarkably similar among themselves than different from the principles of all other languages, it is certainly the most natural conclusion that these common methods of construction have their origin from a single point; that there has been one general source from which the culture of languages in America has been diffused, and which has been the common centre of its diversified idioms."