 There was an early presence of Humboldtian ideas in American linguistics and ethnology dating back to the early nineteenth century in which Humboldt himself had played an active role. Its beginning is marked by Stephen S. Duponceau’s (1760–1844) programmatic report to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1819 on the study the American Indian languages in the “Transactions of the historical and literary committee of the American Philosophical Society”, the founding document of American linguistics, with its reference to Humboldt (Transactions of the historical and literary committee of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 1, Philadelphia, 1819) and the ensuing correspondence between the two men. There is in addition Humboldt’s important correspondence with the second founder of American linguistics, John Pickering (1777–1846) who wrote a lengthy article on the American Indian languages for Francis Lieber’s Encyclopedia Americana where specific reference is made to Humboldt’s work (see Pickering 1831). Francis Lieber (1798–1872), the creator and editor of the Encyclopedia Americana, besides corresponding with the German linguist, followed Humboldtian principles or what he understood of them in his own linguistic work on the American languages (see for example Lieber’s “The Plan of Thought in American Languages”, in H. R. Schoolcraf’s History and Statistics of the Indian Tribes of the United State, vol. ii, 346–349, Washington, 1853). The most prominent American ethnologist and linguist of the second half of the nineteenth century, Daniel G. Brinton (1837–1899) was well acquainted with Humboldt’s work on the American Indian tongues, as far as it was known then. He viewed his own researches as following the path that Humboldt had first laid out. There are references to Humboldt throughout his work, he translated an unpublished treatise of his “On the American Verb System” and regarded him as founder of “the Philosophy of Language” (Brinton 1890, p. 332.). Yet what he and his followers understood by this term was confined largely to the methodological principles that governed Humboldt’s typological and comparative studies and excluded essential dimensions and the actual philosophical concerns expressed in his writings. 