attainable. Having then a Vocabulary of some words of other languages to submit to this society to be appended to this Paper, I propose to incorporate with them their equivalents in the Mayan, whereby those who wish it may compare their relative characteristics. Before leaving this part of the subject, I will take the opportunity of referring to the effect which the climate has apparently on the human system in this country. I have already intimated my opinion of the judgment of those writers who dwell on the Varieties of Man as displayed in their complexions, while acknowledging that the differences in their conformations may be somewhat more continuous and permanent. In a paper which I read before this Society in June last I noticed the effect which the climate of North America had on the descendants of Europeans, and added that I could satisfactorily to myself at least observe that this effect extended also to the descendants of Africans in the United States, in the Bahamas, and even in Cuba, of children born of the same parents, I could undertake to say which had been born in Cuba and which in Africa. In Yucatan I observed the same effect on the Creole Spaniards, who were evidently to be distinguished from their European brethren. With them, without any suspicion of mixture of blood, I could observe the figure more lanky, the hair coarser on the head and scantier on the face, the color and skin assuming a parchment hue, and the whole character becoming apathetic, with a drawling accent different from the natives of Spain, which could scarcely have been brought about by the heat of the climate merely, inasmuch as that differed little from the temperature of Spain, but might have arisen from geological causes operating throughout the Continent. There was much more worthy of attention in the character of the people beyond what I have adverted to, which however I reserve for a separate notice, as the object of the present paper is only generally to dwell on the characteristic differences of the various tribes on the New Continent to show their probable respective origins. The next people that are to be found there to attract our attention are the remnants of the Caribs, of whom there are considerable numbers along the whole line of coast from the Belize to the Brazils. The unfortunate practice to which I have before referred, of our self styled Ethnographers calling the same people by different names, without any attempt to ascertain their affinities or divergencies, has led to much confusion with respect to these people which might and ought to have been avoided. Humboldt, Hervas, and others of the better class of observers, have shown that what was merely
