The Menominees, sometimes called the “White Indians,” formerly occupied the region bordering on Lake Michigan, around Green Bay. The whiteness of these Indians, which is compared to that of white mulattoes, early attracted the attention of the Jesuit missionaries, and has often been commented upon by travellers.[280] While it is true that hybridity has done much to lighten the color of many of the tribes, still the peculiarity of the complexion of this people has been marked from the first time a European encountered them. Almost every shade, from the ash color of the Menominees, through the cinnamon red, copper and bronze tints, may be found among the tribes formerly occupying the territory east of the Mississippi—the remnants of some of which are now in the Indian Territory and others in the North-west—until we reach the dark-skinned Kaws of Kansas, who are nearly as black as the negro. The Indians in Mexico are known as the “black people,” an appellation designed to be descriptive of their color. Viollet le Duc is of the opinion that the builders of the great remains in Southern Mexico and Yucatan belonged to two different branches of the human family, a light-skinned and dark-skinned race respectively.[281] The variety of complexion is as great in South America as among the tribes of the northern portion of the continent. Probably one of the most incontrovertible arguments against American ethnic unity is that which rests upon the unparalleled diversity of language which meets the philologist everywhere. The monosyllable and the most remarkable polysyllables known to the linguist; synthetic and analytic families of speech, simplicity and complexity of expression, all seem to have sprung up and developed into permanent and in some cases beautiful and grammatical systems side by side with each other until the Babel of the Pentateuch is realized in the indescribable confusion of tongues. The actual number of American languages and dialects is as yet unascertained, but is estimated at nearly thirteen hundred, six hundred of which Mr. Bancroft has classified in his third volume of the _Native Races of the Pacific States_. It is true that the American languages present a few features quite peculiar to themselves (which will be treated hereafter), but as language is never constant, is not a pyramid with its unchanging architectural plan, but is a plant which passes through such transitions in the process of its growth as to lose entirely some of the elements which it possessed at first, so we may as reasonably expect that in the course of time certain peculiarities incident to certain climatic conditions, certain phases of nature and certain types of civilization, should develop themselves as distinguishing features of the speech of the continent. The very fact that language is unstable—is a matter of growth—renders the argument that these peculiarities indicate unity of the American