America than with any others that are known: like them, it is highly polysynthetic, incorporating into its verbal forms a host of pronominal relations which are elsewhere expressed by independent words; like them, also, it compounds words together by representative fragments. But it does not show the same tendency to fuse the whole sentence into a verb; its nouns have an inflection which is much more Scythian than American in type; and there are other differences which distinctly enough discourage the conjecture that it can be historically akin with the tongues of this continent. Some other among the various populations of southern Europe, treated by the ancients as of strange tongue and lineage, and which have now totally disappeared, may possibly have been akin with the Basques: such questions are covered with a darkness which we cannot hope ever to see dispelled.
In Italy are still found the relics of one of these isolated and perished peoples, the Etruscans. They were a race of much higher culture than the Basques, and their neighbourhood to Rome, and their resulting influence, peaceful and warlike, upon her growing polity and developing history, give them a historical importance to which the Iberian race can lay no claim. Inscriptions in their language, written in legible characters, and in some instances of assured meaning, are preserved to our day; yet its linguistic character and connections are an unsolved and probably insoluble problem. Every few years, some one of those philologists whose judgments are easily taken captive by a few superficial correspondences claims to have proved its relationship with some known family, and thus to have determined the ethnological position of the race that spoke it; but his arguments and conclusions are soon set aside as of no more value than others already offered and rejected.
Again, there is found in the mountain-range of the Caucasus a little knot of idioms which have hitherto baffled the efforts of linguistic scholars to connect them with other known forms of speech. Their principal groups are four: the Georgian and the Circassian stretch along the southern and northern shores respectively of the eastern extremity of
