been so much increased by later researches, as to make us feel confident, that, if so acute an observer as Dr. Prichard had been able to profit by them, he would have written in much more decided terms than he has done of the miscellaneous character of the American population, especially when he has touched so closely upon it in his own enquiries, as must have led him to the same conclusions, had he not been evidently biassed by too high a respect for the judgment of those who had preceded him. These remarks apply also in a great measure to the Baron von Humboldt, who in like manner has given too ready an assent to the assertions of previous writers, as to the peculiar general uniformity of structure of the American languages. This was principally, if not altogether founded upon a fanciful idea of polysynthetism or agglutination, as they called it, propounded by Du Ponceau, but which, as I showed in the Paper before mentioned, has been given up by the later and better informed writers of the United States as incorrect and untenable. As this theory has been received by so many writers, including Dr. Prichard, with more credit than it deserved, I will venture, though at the risk of being considered tedious, to show its unsatisfactoriness in itself, and its insufficiency if correct, to be a proof of the American languages being different in structure from the other languages of the world. Dr. Prichard says, "To understand the difference between the American mode of agglutination and the ordinary composition of words in many other families of languages, we must observe that the American idioms make up new compounds from a number of small fragments of simple words, and again treating these compounds as if they were simple vocables mutilate or contract them to form other aggregate words." He then goes on to say that the Basque language does the same, though not to carry the peculiarity so far, and then gives instances of what is referred to, one from Du Ponceau and the other from Heckewelder. "When a Delaware woman," says Du Ponceau, "is caressing a little dog, or other young animal, she will say to it 'Kuligatschis', meaning 'give me your pretty little paw.' The word is thus compounded; K is the inseparable pronoun of the second person, meaning either thou or they; uli is part of the word wulit, meaning handsome or pretty; gat is part of the word wichgat, meaning leg or paw, and schis is a diminutive termination." Now if this trifling had not been admitted by Dr. Prichard, I should not have thought it deserving of notice, and even thus cannot but think the peculiarity claimed for the American languages on such grounds unworthy of a Philologist. Such familiar
