ring's straits, are pretty certainly related with the Eskimos of the northern shores of the opposite continent, and thus appear to be emigrants out of America into Asia.
Between the races we have mentioned and the Yakuts of the Lena, that far outlying branch of the Turkish family, finally, live the Yukagiris, another isolated and widely spread people, not proved by their language to be akin with any of their neighbours.
It was the more necessary to glance at the intricate and ill understood linguistic relations of this part of the Asiatic continent, because our eyes naturally turn curiously in that direction, when we inquire whence and how our own American continent obtained the aboriginal population which we have been dispossessing. It is evident that much remains to be done upon the Asiatic side of the straits before the linguistic scholar can be ready for a comparison which shall show with what race of the Old World, if with any, the races of the New are allied in speech.
The south-eastern portion of Asia is occupied by peoples whose tongues form together a single class or family. They fill China and Farther India, and some of the neighbouring parts of the central Asiatic plateau. The distinctive common characteristic of these tongues is that they are monosyllabic. Of all human dialects, they represent most nearly what, as we have already seen reason for concluding, was the primitive stage of the agglutinative and inflective forms of speech; they have never begun that fusion of elements once independently significant into compound forms which has been the principal item in the history of development of all other tongues. The Chinese words, for example, are still to no small extent roots, representing ideas in crude and undefined form, and equally convertible by use into noun, verb, or adverb. Thus, ta contains the radical idea of 'being great,' and may, as a substantive, mean 'greatness;' as an adjective, 'great;' as a verb, either 'to be great,' or 'to make great, to magnify;' as an adverb, 'greatly:' the value which it is to have as actually employed, in any given case, is determined partly by its position in the phrase, and partly by the requirements of the sense, as gathered from the complex of
