common ancestral speech”.[234] Accordingly the group may be defined (at least provisionally) as a linguistic family or stock, and may be distinguished by the family name long ago applied by Pimentel and Orozco, with the termination prescribed in Powell’s fifth rule,[235] viz., _Serian_. Conformably, the classification of the group would become— [234] Indian linguistic families, by J. W. Powell, in Seventh Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology, 1885-86 (1891), p. 11. [235] Ibid., p. 10. Serian stock, comprising— Seri tribe, including Tiburones and (certain) Salineros; Tepoka tribe; Guayma tribe; Upanguayma tribe. Naturally this classification is provisional in certain respects. It is little more than tentative in so far as the Tepoka are concerned, since no word of the Tepoka tongue has ever been recorded, so far as is known, and since the tribe is still extant and within reach of research; it must be held provisional also in respect to the separateness of the stock, which may be found in the future to be affiliated with neighboring stocks, though the effect of the more recent and more critical researches in eliminating supposed evidences of affiliation points in the opposite direction. The arrangement is in some measure provisional also with respect to the relations between the long-extinct Guayma and Upanguayma and the type tribe, especially since contrary suggestion has been offered in terms implying the existence of unpublished data; yet the presumption in favor of the critical work by Ramirez, Pimentel, and Orozco is so strong that practically this feature of the classification may be deemed final. * * * * * No attempt has been made to render the tribal synonymy exhaustive, though search of the records has incidentally brought out the more important synonyms, as follows: _Seri Tribe_