Note 738 — Chapter X

“As regards this Aztec element, I do not mean to say that these languages are related to the Aztec language in the same sense that other languages are spoken of as being related to each other, for this might lead those who are searching for the former habitation or fatherland of the Aztecs, to suppose that it has been found. This element consists simply in a number of words identical or reasonably approximate to the like Aztec words, and in the similarity, perhaps, of a few grammatical rules. How this Aztec word-material crept into the languages of the Shoshones, whether by inter-communication, or Aztec colonization, we do not know. Nor do I wish to be understood as attempting to sustain the popular theory of an Aztec migration from the North; on the contrary, the evidences of language are all on the other side.”—Bancroft’s Native Races, vol. iii, pp. 660–1.