the group.  As for likeness of roots, here is a specimen:  gyordunus is the Turkish for the Finnish naikke.—­So here you see a degree of kinship much more remote than that you find in the Aryan.  Where, say, Dutch and Gaelic are brothers—­at least near relations and bosom friends,—­Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in passing.  And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the sons of a common father:  according to legends of both peoples, the ancestor of the Turks was the brother of the ancestor of the Mongols. (Always remember that in speaking of Turks thus scientifically, one does not mean the Ottomans, who inherit their language, but are almost purely Caucasian or even Aryan, in blood.)

Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group:  Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan.  Here there are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship.  They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side, noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other’s existence.  They suppose they are akin—­through Adam; but whould tell you that much has happened since then.  Their kinship consists in this:  the words are each are billiard-balls—­and yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes.  Thus I should call a Tibetan name like nGamri-srong-btsan a good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one like T’ang Tai-tsong a perfectly round smooth one of the kind we know.—­The languages are akin, because each say, where we should say ‘the horse kicked the man,’ horse agent man kicking completion, or words to that effect,—­dapped out nearly in spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables.  But the words for horse and man, in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively as much phonetic likeness as geegee and equus, and Smith and Jones. As to the value and possibilities of such languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. One says:  “Chinese has the greatest capacity of any language ever invented”; the other, “The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness.”

In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, shih, pronounced like the first three letters in the word shirt in English.  That vocable may mean:  history, or to employ, or a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time, poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a house, and all such things as that;—­I mention a few out of the list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused:  would think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about poetry, and so on.  But there is a way of throwing a little