In their
legends it is represented as the gift of the Great Spirit (Chipeways),
brought from the terrestrial Paradise by the sacred animals (Quiches),
and symbolically the mother of the race (Nahuas), and the material from
which was moulded the first of men (Quiches).
As the races, so the great families of man who speak dialects of the
same tongue are, in a sense, individuals, bearing each its own
physiognomy. When the whites first heard the uncouth gutturals of the
Indians, they frequently proclaimed that hundreds of radically diverse
languages, invented, it was piously suggested, by the Devil for the
annoyance of missionaries, prevailed over the continent. Earnest
students of such matters--Vater, Duponceau, Gallatin, and
Buschmann--have, however, demonstrated that nine-tenths of the area of
America, at its discovery, were occupied by tribes using dialects
traceable to ten or a dozen primitive stems. The names of these, their
geographical position in the sixteenth century, and, so far as it is
safe to do so, their individual character, I shall briefly mention.
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