THE linguistic classification of the South American tribes offers far greater difficulties than that of North America. Not only has it been studied less diligently, but the geographical character of the interior, the facilities with which tribes move along its extensive water-ways, and the less stable temperament of the white population have combined to obscure the relationship of the native tribes and to limit our knowledge about them.

The first serious attempt to take a comprehensive survey of the idioms of this portion of the continent was that of the Abbé Hervas in his general work on the languages of the globe. Balbi and Adelung did scarcely more than pursue the lines he had traced in this portion of the field. So little had these obtained definite results that Alexander von Humboldt renounced as impracticable the arrangement of South American tribes by their languages, because “more than seven-eighths would have remained what the classifying botanists call incertœ sedis.”