monosyllabic family, in China and Farther India, and countries adjacent to these; the Malay-Polynesian and Melanesian, scattered over the numberless islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans; the Hamitic, composed of the Egyptian and its congeners, chiefly in northern Africa; the South-African, filling Africa about and below the equator; and the American, covering with its greatly varied forms our western continent, from the Arctic Ocean to the Antarctic. Besides these great families, we took note of several isolated languages or lesser groups, of doubtful or wholly unknown relationship: as those in extreme north-eastern Asia, in the Caucasian mountains, in central Africa; as the Basque in the Pyrenees, the Albanian in north-western Greece, the Yenisean in Siberia, and the extinct Etruscan in northern Italy.
The scheme of classification, as thus drawn out, was a genetical one, founded on actual historical relationship. Each family or group was intended to be made up of those tongues which there is found sufficient reason to regard as kindred dialects, as common descendants of the same original. We were obliged, however, to confess that our classification had not everywhere the same value, as the evidences of relationship were not of an equally unequivocal character in all the families, or else had been thus far incompletely gathered in and examined. Where, as in the case of Indo-European and Semitic speech, we find structural accordance combined with identity of material, as traced out and determined by long-continued and penetrating study on the part of many investigators, there the unity of the families is placed beyond the reach of reasonable doubt. But it is unfortunately true that these two are the only groups of wide extent and first-rate importance respecting which the linguistic student can speak with such fulness of confidence; everywhere else, there is either some present deficiency of information, which fame may or may not remove, or the conditions are such that our belief in the genetic relationship must rest upon the more questionable ground of correspondence in structural development. We may by no means deny that morphological accordance is capable of rising to such a value as should
