Lon BRITISH COLUMBIA.

were later submerged by the “‘ round-headed ”’ folk who appropriated the Coast
for their own. At one time the representatives of two distinct races must have
been co-occupants of these shores; an opinion confirmed by the survival among
the Coast tribes of certain cultural elements and lingual traces not to be other-
wise accounted for.

There is no disputing the fact that the round-headed Mongolian type pre-
dominates along the whole Coast to-day, bearing obvious evidence of its racial
connection with the Asiatic people of North-eastern Siberia, with whom they
share certain customs as well as physical features. [his Mongoloid race is very
ancient and widely distributed in the Old World. It has proved its adaptability
to support life under every sort of condition, and is endowed with many good
qualities of industry and manual dexterity, combined with artistic skill. ‘There
is no disputing its physical characteristics, reflected in skull type and square build,
in skin colour and straight black hair.

Another dominant type, that of the Athapaskan people, is represented in the
Interior of the Province, especially in the northern and central areas. “Their
migration to this continent is believed to have closely preceded or succeeded that
of the North-west Coast people. Apparently a part of this wave did not flow
eastward with its major portion, but stagnated in the far north for (it is pre-
sumed) about a thousand years before starting more directly southwards. It is
believed that from very remote times their physical type was influenced by inter-
marriage with other tribes, for they are to this day characterized in all relations
of life by extreme susceptibility to the influence of those with whom they come
in contact, absorbing and adapting it to the practical extinction of their racial and
cultural inheritance.

(3.) INFORMATION TO BE GAINED BY A STUDY OF A
PEOPLE’S LANGUAGE. ~

So numerous and diverse were the languages and dialects spoken among the
tribes of British Columbia when discovered by the Spaniards and British explorers
that they have been described as “a Babel of conflicting tongues.” Here again
a usual source of information as to prehistoric phases of a people’s past is beset
with difficulties. Eleven ‘linguistic stocks’? were current in Canada in the
eighteenth century, six of which, confined to the relatively limited area west of
the Rockies, were again subdivided into a vast number of dialects. “Thus though
the Haida and Tsimshian were near-neighbours, resembling each other closely in
nearly all respects, their languages were as different one from the other as are
English and Russian at the present day.

The language in use by the Nootka on the west coast of Vancouver Island
and by the Kwakiutl on the east sprang from the “ Wakashan ” linguistic stock,
but so divergent were their dialects that they were mutually unintelligible.
Another linguistic stock, the “ Salishan,”’ spread over a very large area from the
south-east of Vancouver Island up to the Okanagan district, exhibits the same
quality of numerous varied dialects. “The Interior tribes of Athapaskan origin,
susceptible as they were in almost all other respects to outside influences, clung
tenaciously to their own language, which is said to be the most difficult of all
these tribal tongues, and most resistant to change. In their case this quality gives
a clue to their wanderings, which extended across Canada and down to the
borders of Mexico. Speaking generally, these tribal languages throw little or
no light on racial origins; for even the Kootenay had a language of their own,
unrelated to any of those to which reference has just been made.