1. The Maipure, Abipone, Mbaya and Mocobi languages place only the personal sign in intimate connection with the verb, and allow the tense and mode signs to be loosely attached. They have therefore but one type of personal forms to be applied in every tense and mode by means of the particles or the affixes formed from them. This type, taken alone, usually forms the present; but, accurately speaking, this name cannot be assigned it; because the signs of the other tenses are also dropped when this can be done without obscurity. _Ya-chaguani-me-yaladi._ Here the first word is in the indefinite form, though it is not the present but the perfect. The _me_ is really the preposition “in;” but usage has adopted it for the subjunctive sign, and so the Spanish grammarians call it; or rather, the verb is considered to be introduced by a conjunction, “if,” “as,” so that it is usually not in the present but a past tense. If this is the case with the last verb, the first one must have the same tense, and so the whole phrase, without any tense sign, means, “I had helped him when I said it.” One would scarcely expect to find anything like this in cultivated languages. Yet it does occur in both Sanscrit and Greek. The now meaningless particle _sma_ in Sanscrit when it follows the present changes it into a past, and in Greek αν alters the indicative into a subjunctive. To form this general type, the Maipure makes use of the unchanged possessive pronoun, and treats nouns and verbs in the same manner. The noun must always be united to a possessive pronoun, a trait common to all the Orinoco tongues and many other American languages. In the 3d person sing., however, neither the verb nor the noun has such a pronoun, but it is to be understood; _nuani_, my son; _ani_, alone, not son, but “his son.” The 3d pers. sing. of the verb is often the mere stem, without a personal sign, but that this peculiarity should also extend to the noun I have met only in this tongue. It is evident that a pronoun is considered as essential to a noun as to a verb, and although a similar usage is found in many tongues, yet it appears in none so binding. There are, indeed, some nouns which are free from the necessity of thinking them in connection with a person, but these have the suffix _ti_, which is dropped when the possessive pronoun is added; _java ti_, a hatchet, _nu java_, my hatchet. From this it is evident that _ti_ does not belong to the stem, and is incompatible with the use of a possessive, hence it is the sign of the substantive, in its independent condition. The same occurs in Mexican, and the chief termination of substantives, _tli_, is almost identical in sound with that in the Maipure.