It may be urged that the Amerind languages are loose and shifting and that a few centuries would be sufficient to bring about on this continent a complete and total difference in a language from its mother tongue in, we will say, Siberia; but the more closely the matter is studied the more apparent is the tenacity with which each stock retains its special form. Of this tenacity a modern example exists in the village of Tewa (or Hano) now forming one of the seven villages of the Moki, and situated on what is known as the “First or East Mesa.” The people of this village are not Hopi (Moki) stock, Hopi being the Moki name for themselves,[21] but belong to a Rio Grande stock, the Tañoan of Powell, and the Tehua of Brinton, having come from the Rio Grande country to their present location somewhere about 1680. The Moki, who are believed to belong to the Shoshonean stock (though they are probably composite), permitted them to repair and occupy old houses which stood on the site of the present village and there they have lived amicably ever since, to all appearances completely amalgamated with the Moki. The ordinary observer sees little to distinguish them from the other Amerinds of the locality, and they speak the Moki language like Mokis, but within their own village and by their own firesides they largely use the speech of their forefathers, and to all appearances will go on speaking it till the end. Here, then, is this little community separated for a long period and by many miles from their immediate kindred, mingling daily with people of another stock and another language, yet preserving their own language intact.[22] And if this has happened once within historical times it may have happened before any number of times, and goes to prove that these various languages have in them elements of stability greater than has heretofore been admitted. Powell says that in his long study of savage tongues he has everywhere been “impressed with the fact that they are singularly persistent, and that a language which is dependent for its existence upon oral tradition is not easily modified.” On the other hand John Fiske expresses the opinion that “barbaric languages are neither widespread nor durable. In the course of two or three generations a dialect gets so strangely altered as virtually to lose its identity.” The Algonquian languages were spread over an immense area, and the Shoshonean had an even greater range. [Illustration: SOUTH-WEST CORNER OF THE TEMPLE OF XOCHICALCO, STATE OF MORELOS, MEXICO Photographed by M. H. Saville for the American Museum of Natural History ]