Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity [pp. 250-294]

2Apologetics. [P
able proofs of a common primitive relation existing between
the Semitic and Japhetic, or Indo-European branches of the
human family.
The great American family, regarded by the naturalists as
furnishing the next clearest case of perfect isolation, in its
origin and history, under the combined labours of Gallatin, Du
Ponceau, Pickering, Alexander Humboldt, and Hale, has
been brought into such relationship as to authorize general
ethnologists like Prichard, Bunsen, and Latham, to lay it down
as settled, 1. that all the countless and highly diversified languages of the western continent constitute but one great family,
divided into a few subordinate groups, with some minor offshoots not yet placed:-a fact which is wholly inexplicable on
any other hypothesis than that of ethnological affiliation; and
2. that this family'displays so many and striking marks of
analogy, in point of grammatical structure, and even amidst
the general and wide discrepancies of its vocabulary, so many
cases of obvious analogy in its roots, and its lexicographical
forms, that Bunsen does not hesitate to pronounce it a scion of
the great Turanian stock of Central Asia; and Latham, in his
latest and maturest contribution to ethnology,* undertakes to
trace the aboriginal American race, by the aid of philology,
from Terra del Fuego to the North Eastern parts of Asia. We
need scarcely add that the cranial conformation perfectly
agrees with this philological result.
Still another and wholly independent line of investigation
has led to a farther'result in a different quarter, pointing to
the same general conclusion. William Yon Humboldt, in the
elaborate and learned introduction to his great work on the
Kawi tongues of the South East of Asia, has established, to
the unanimous acceptance of the ethnologists of Europe, a
clear connection between the widely diffused languages of Polynesia and the Kawi or Malay family, and thus brought them
into relation with the Turanian or eastern branch of the great
Asiatic stock. Thus again we have affiliated with the central
province of Asia, a class of languages spoken by people who
must constitute a separate division of the human race, if such
* Man and his Migrations; by R. G. Latham. New York, Charles B. Norton,
71 Chambers street.
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