would seem to warrant further study and investigation in connection with
the indigenous people of our continent, thereby awakening new sources of
inquiry among ethnologists.


LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES.

The sienite plummet from San Joaquin Valley, California, goes back to
the distant age of the Drift; and the Calaveras skull, admitting its
authenticity, goes back to the Pliocene epoch, and is older than the
relics or stone implements from the drift gravel and the European caves.

It is doubtful, though, whether these data enable us to make
generalizations equal in value to those afforded by the study of
vocabularies. It is alleged that linguistic affinities exist between
some of the tribes of the American coast and our Oriental neighbors
across the Pacific. Mr. Brooks, whom I have already quoted, reports that
in March, 1860, he took an Indian boy on board the Japanese steam
corvette _Kanrin-maru_, where a comparison of Coast-Indian and pure
Japanese was made at his request by Funkuzawa Ukitchy, then Admiral's
secretary; the result of which he prepared for the press and published
with a view to suggesting further linguistic investigations. He says
that quite an infusion of Japanese words is found among some of the
Coast tribes of Oregon and California, either pure or clipped, along
with some very peculiar Japanese "idioms, constructions, honorific,
separative, and agglutinative particles"; that shipwrecked Japanese are
invariably enabled to communicate understandingly with the Coast
Indians, although speaking quite a different language, and that many
shipwrecked Japanese have informed him that they were enabled to
communicate with and understand the natives of Atka and Adakh islands of