striking morphological similarities between neighboring stocks which, however, are not accompanied by appreciable similarities in vocabulary. At that time I was inclined to consider these similarities as a proof of relationship of the same order as that of languages belonging, for instance, to the Indo-European family. While further studies, particularly in California, have shown that we may generalize the observations which I made based on the languages of the North Pacific coast, I doubt whether the interpretation given at that time is tenable.
When we consider the history of human languages as it is revealed by their present distribution and by what little we know about their history during the last few thousand years, it appears fairly clearly that the present wide distribution of a few linguistic stocks is a late phenomenon, and that in earlier times the area occupied by each linguistic family was small. It seems reasonable to suppose that the number of languages that have disappeared is very large. Taking our American conditions as an example, we may observe at the present time that many languages are spoken by small communities, and while there is no proof of the recent development of any new very divergent language, there are numerous proofs showing the extinction of some languages and the gradual extension of others. As the area occupied by the Indo-European family has gradually extended and as foreign languages have become extinct owing to its expansion, so we find that Chinese has gradually expanded its area. In Siberia, Turkish and other native languages have superseded the ancient local languages. In Africa the large expansion of Bantu is rather recent. Arabic is superseding the native speech in North Africa. In America the expansion of Algonquin speech has been continuing during the historic period, and several of the isolated languages of the Southeast have been superseded by Creek and related languages. I have discussed this question in another place and have explained my view that probably at a very early time the diversity of languages among people of the same physical type was much greater than it is now. I do not mean to imply by this that all the languages must have developed entirely independently, but rather
