That the Natchez were offshoots of the Mayas I was the first to surmise and to prove by a careful comparison of one hundred Natchez words with their equivalents in the Maya dialects.

Of these, _five_ have affinities more or less marked to words peculiar to the Huastecas of the river Panuco (a Maya colony), _thirteen_ to words common to Huasteca and Maya, and _thirty-nine_ to words of similar meaning in the latter language.

This resemblance may be exemplified by the numerals, one, two, four, seven, eight, twenty.

In Natchez they are _hu_, _ah_, _gan_, _uk-woh_, _upku-tepish_, _oka-poo_: in Maya, _hu_, _ca_, _can_, _uk_, _uapxae_, _hunkal_.

(See the Am.