THE ORIGIN OF THE MEXICAN CIVILIZATION PRELIMINARY NOTICE

traces of its origin even when the science and literature that are embodied in it have widely diverged. No inquiry, however, has led to satisfactory results. The languages spread over the Western continent far exceed in number those found in any equal population in the Eastern.⁴⁹ They exhibit the remarkable anomaly of differing as widely in etymology as they agree in organization; and, on the other hand, while they bear some slight affinity to the languages of the Old World in the former particular, they have no resemblance to them whatever in the latter.⁵⁰ The Mexican was spoken for an extent of three hundred leagues. But within the boundaries of New Spain more than twenty languages were found; not simply dialects, but, in many instances, radically different.⁵¹ All these idioms, however, with one exception, conformed to that peculiar synthetic structure by which every Indian dialect appears to have been fashioned, from the land of the Esquimaux to Terra del Fuego;⁵² a system which, bringing the greatest number of ideas within the smallest possible compass, condenses whole sentences into a single word,⁵³ displaying a curious mechanism, in which some discern the hand of the philosopher, and others only the spontaneous efforts of the savage.⁵⁴