To the philologist, the efforts at supplying equivalent terms for objects and ideas common to the many diverse races furnish a study full of interest. A Chinook or Clatsop word modified to saghalie, signifying “above,” or “high,” is compounded with the Nootka tyee, as the name of the High Chief, or God. Elip, a Chihalis word, signifies “first,” or “before”; tilikum, Chinook, is “people, a tribe,” or “band”; but the two words conjoined, elip-tilikum, lit. “the first people,” is employed in reference to a race of beings who preceded the Indians as inhabitants of the world, just as we speak of the Antediluvians. Ipsoot is the Chinook word for “to hide,” ipsoot wau-wau is “to hide one’s speech,” i.e. “to whisper.” Or, again, opitsah is a modification of the Chinook for “a knife”; opitsah-yakka-sikha, literally, “the knife’s friend,” is “a fork.” The same word is also applied to a sweetheart. Such economic use of words is indeed by no means rare. But this branch of the subject lies apart from the aim of the present paper. It may be noted, however, in passing, that many of the jargon words, according to Mr. Gibbs, “have been adopted into ordinary conversation in Oregon, and threaten to become permanently incorporated as a local addition to the English.” Mr. Horatio Hale, long ago, stated as a result of his own observations, at an earlier date: “There are Canadians and half-breeds married to Chinook women, who can only converse with their wives in this speech; and it is the fact, strange as it may seem, that many young children are growing up to whom this factitious language is really the mother-tongue, and who speak it with more readiness and perfection than any other.”^[104] As to grammar, the jargon has no more than the inevitable rudiments involved in the necessity for expressing in some way ideas relating to time and number; and in these directions there is frequent resort to signs. But this, which accords with the first stage of picture-writing, is true of the speech of many Indian tribes. Their gesture-language is being reduced to the equivalent of a vocabulary, and is much more copious than that of the Oregon jargon. In 1880 the United States Bureau of Ethnology issued “A Collection of the gesture-signs and signals of the North American Indians”; and although this was only designed as a preliminary step towards the complete elucidation of the subject, it suffices to show how important a part signs and gestures play in the dialogue of many rude tribes. The Arapahoes, for example, according to Burton, “possess a very scanty vocabulary, and can hardly converse with one another in the dark. To make a stranger understand them they must always repair to the camp-fire for pow-wow.”^[105] We are not without some due appreciation, even now, of the eloquence of action, as well as of speech, in the effective orator; and Charles Lamb, in one of the Essays of Elia, aptly reminds us how much even ordinary dialogue owes to expression for its full effect. Candle-light, “our peculiar and household planet,” is the theme of the quaint humorist. “Wanting it,” he says, “what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses! . . . What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour’s cheek to be sure that he understood it?” And so the grave humorist goes on to picture the privations of a supper party in “those unlanterned nights.”

But the Indian, in many cases, resorts to the pencil, or its equivalent, for the elucidation of subjects in which language fails him. He will take a burnt stick and draw a map indicating the route that has to be taken, the portages on a river, or the trail through the forest, after he has failed by signs and gestures to convey his meaning; and he can interpret with ease the drawings of Indians of other tribes. When camping out on the Nepigon River in 1866, with Indian guides from the Saskatchewan, who were strangers to the locality, they interpreted the drawings or carvings on a soft metamorphic rock overlaid by the syenite of that district; and were able thereby to tell us who had preceded them, and to determine the route we should take. Lieutenant Whipple in the narration of his route near the thirty-fifth parallel, remarks: “Near the Llano Extacado were seen Pueblo Indians from San Domingo. After an introductory smoke they became quite communicative, furnishing curious information as to their traditions and peculiar faith. When questioned regarding the numbers and positions of the Pueblos in New Mexico, they rudely traced upon the ground a sketch from which a map of the country is reproduced in the Government Reports.”^[106] The Rev. Dr. O’Meara, for many years a missionary among the Ojibway Indians of Lake Superior, thus writes to me: “The Indians were always pictorial, even in common conversation, i.e. they liked to explain what they meant by making figures; and always, if you asked one of them for information as to the route to any place, he would make a rough map of it, either on the sand or on a piece of birch-bark.” This fully accords with my own experience. I have repeatedly seen Indian guides take a piece of birch-bark and indicate on it some idea otherwise inexpressible from our ignorance of any common language. Their map-making must be familiar to all who have travelled much with Indian guides. They delineate with much accuracy the leading geographical features of any familiar locality. I have in my note-books sketches made by Indians, when I have placed the pencil in their hand, and indicated by signs some information I desired to obtain, about game, fishing, or other matters familiar to them; or about their own tribal relationships, which they generally express in totemic fashion by their symbolic bear, deer, beaver, eagle, turtle, or other animal. Such signs of the clan, tribe, or nation are familiar to every Indian, as well as the ideographs of his own and others’ names; and when represented on the roll of birch-bark, painted on the chiefs buffalo robe, or inverted on his grave-post, they can be interpreted with the same facility with which an heraldic student discerns the family history on the painted hatchment or the sculptured shields of some noble mausoleum.

By an alphabet, strictly so called, we understand a series of symbols which have become the conventional equivalents to the eye of the sounds which combine to form the speech of a people. But alpha, beta, etc., were undoubtedly, in their first stage, pictures, and not arbitrary signs; though they passed undesignedly into the demotic characters of the Egyptian current hand, and were then transformed, from ideographic and syllabic characters, into the true phonetics out of which have come the later alphabets of the civilised world. Egypt is justly credited with the origination of a system of writing which lies at the foundation of all our inherited knowledge, and which, as Bacon says, “makes ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations and inventions, the one of the other.” Yet the germ of all this lay in the graphic records of the palæolithic cave-men; and the very same process of evolution from pure pictorial representation to picture-writing or ideography, and so to arbitrary hieroglyphic signs, or word-writing, is seen in the graven records of Copan or Palenque, and on the ancient monuments of the Nile.

It is replete with interest thus to turn aside from the Old World, with all its wealth of intellectual progress associated with the letters of Cadmus, and find that in the western hemisphere the human mind has followed the very same path in its struggle towards the light. Longfellow, in his “Song of Hiawatha,” has interwoven Algonkin and Iroquois legends into a national epic, in which the elements of Indian progress are all traced to this mythic benefactor, subsequently identified by Mr. Horatio Hale, in his Book of Iroquois Rites, with a wise Onondaga chief of the fifteenth century. But, tracing in legendary fashion the early steps of Indian progress, the poet represents the mythic reformer mourning how all things perish and pass into oblivion. Even the great achievements and the traditions of their people fade away from the memory of the old men. And so he inaugurates the method of recording events, which in reality we recognise as the natural product of the human mind in the exercise of that imitative faculty which the discoveries of comparatively recent years have revealed to us as in full activity among the men of Europe’s remote Post-Glacial era. With his paints of diverse colours he depicts on the smooth birch-bark simple figures and symbols, such as are to be seen graven on hundreds of rocks throughout the North American continent, and are in constant use by the Indian in chronicling his own deeds on his buffalo robe, or recording those of the deceased chief on his grave-post. The result is a simple process of picture-writing, readily translatable, with nearly equal facility, into the language of every tribe. Deeds of daring against Indians or white men are set forth by the native chronicler, and the rivals are clearly indicated by means of their characteristic costume and weapons. Headless figures are the symbols of the dead; scalps represent his own special victims; and in like manner incidents of the chase, or feats against the buffalo or grizzly bear, are recorded in graphic picturings, which are as intelligible as any monumental inscription of ancient or modern times. The description in Longfellow’s Indian epic of the celestial and terrestrial symbols, in actual use as Algonkin and other aboriginal hieroglyphics, would answer, with slight modification, for those still to be seen on the walls of Egyptian temples and catacombs: —

The picture-writing of the Aztecs, though greatly improved in execution, and simplified by abbreviations, was the same in principle as that of the rude northern tribes. The recognised signs of the months and days of their calendar are not greatly in advance of Indian symbolism; while some of their pictorial records are as definite pieces of literal representation as the battle of the reindeer from the Dordogne cave, or the peaceful grazing scene recovered from a Swiss grotto near Thayingen. One example of such a pictorial chronicling of an important event has been repeatedly described, and aptly illustrates its practical application. When Cortez held his first interview with the emissaries of Montezuma, one of the attendants of Teuhtlile, the chief Aztec noble, was observed sketching the novel visitors, their peculiar costumes and arms, their horses and ships; and by such means a report of all that pertained to the strange invaders of his dominion was transmitted to the Aztec sovereign. The skill with which every object was delineated excited the admiration of the Spaniards. But however superior this may have been as a piece of art, it was manifestly no advance on the principle of Indian picture-writing; nor can we be in much doubt as to its style of execution, since Lord Kingsborough’s elaborate work furnishes many facsimiles of nearly contemporary Mexican drawings. In the majority of these, the totemic symbols, and the representations of individuals by means of their animal or other cognomens, are abundantly apparent. The specific aim of the artist has to be kept in view. The figures are for the most part grotesque, from the necessity of giving predominance to the special feature in which the symbol is embodied. To the generation for which such were produced, the connection between the sign, and the person or thing signified, would be manifest; and as a mnemonic aid, supplemented by verbal descriptions of the trained official registrars, the record would be ample. But a brief interval suffices to render such abbreviated symbols obscure, if not wholly unintelligible; and within less than a century after the Conquest, De Alva could not find more than two surviving Mexicans, both very aged, who were able to interpret the native pictorial records. Nevertheless a system of picture-writing, originating among the rude forest tribes with the simple employment of the imitative faculty in the representation of familiar objects, with their associated ideas, had advanced on this continent to the very same stage from which, in ancient Egypt, the next step was taken, resulting in the evolution of a phonetic alphabet, and so of all that is implied in letters in the largest sense.

To this grand aim of ideography, or an equivalent of written speech, may, as it appears to me, be traced the earliest efforts at drawing and painting, reaching back to that strange dawn of intellectual vigour revealed to us in the graphic art of the men of Europe’s Palæolithic age. The same effort at written speech underlies all the manifestations of the artistic faculty, common alike to the semi-civilised and to the barbarous native races of this continent; and in the terms by which they express the graphic art in their various dialects, the common significance of drawing and writing is generally apparent. But the æsthetic faculty was thus stimulated into activity with results which tended to develop art in all its forms of carving, modelling, sculpture, and painting. An appreciation of colour, not merely for personal adornment, but in its artistic application—alike as a decorative art, and as the means whereby natural objects can be presented with vivid truthfulness to the eye,—is widely diffused; though the mastery of form by the modeller or sculptor long precedes that of chiaroscuro, or aerial perspective. Aboriginal painting is crude, consisting mainly of colour without tone or shading, even where the drawing is correct. But paints and dyes, both of mineral and vegetable origin, are largely in use by many Indian tribes. The Eskimo execute tasteful patterns on their skin robes in diverse colours; and the northern tribes both to the east and west of the Rocky Mountains dye porcupine quills and grasses, and with them work ornamental patterns on their dresses and in basket-work. The pottery of the Pueblo Indians is elaborately decorated in colours; and in various other ways—as in the colouring of their masks, and the painting of their boats and houses, by the Indians of Oregon and British Columbia,—the native taste for colour is manifested. Mr. Hugh Martin, in a communication of an early date to the American Philosophical Society, gives an account of the principal dyes employed by the North American Indians.^[107] The Shawnees obtained a vegetable red, which they called hau-ta-the-caugh, from the root of a marsh plant, and largely used it in dyeing wool, porcupine quills, and the white hair of deers’ tails. From another root, the Radix flava, a bright yellow was obtained, by mixing which with the red an orange tint is made. But they also extracted a rich orange colour from the Poccon root. A fine vegetable blue is also easily procured, and this was transformed to green by means of a yellow liquor of the smooth hickory bark. Black, which is much in demand, was obtained both from the sumack and from the bark of the white walnut. All the colours thus far named are vegetable dyes, but mineral colours are in general use for painting, and especially for personal decoration, which is no doubt the primary idea associated in the Indian mind with the verb “to paint.” The Lenapes, Dr. Brinton remarks, “obtained red, white, and blue clays, which were in such extensive demand that the vicinity of those streams in Newcastle County, Delaware, which are now called White Clay Creek and Red Clay Creek, are widely known to the natives as Walamink, ‘the place of paint.’ ”^[108] The Shawnees applied the name Alamonee-sepee, “Paint Creek,” to the stream which falls into the Scioto close to Chilicothe. The word walamen, signifying “to paint,” is the Shawnee alamon, and the Abnaki wramann, the r being substituted for the l. Roger Williams, describing the New England Indians, speaks of “wunnam, their red painting, which they most delight in,—both the bark of the pine, as also a red earth.” The word is derived from Narr. wunne, Del. wulit, Chip. gwanatseh: “beautiful, handsome, good, pretty,” etc. “The Indian who had bedaubed his skin with red ochreous clay, was esteemed in full dress, and delightful to look upon. Hence the term wulit, ‘fine, pretty,’ came to be applied to the paint itself.”^[109]

A review of the terms of art in the diverse aboriginal vocabularies would furnish an interesting supplement to the general question of the manifestation of an artistic faculty, and the evidences of appreciation of art among savage races. I note a few illustrations, which the languages of some Northern Indian tribes supply, of the ideas associated in the native mind with terms of art. The Algonkin languages generally have no distinctive words clearly discriminating between painting, drawing, and writing in the sense of ideography; though the inevitable tendency to invent or appropriate words, as equivalents expressive of any novel object or idea, is in operation in those as in other languages. The Ojibways have no generic term for painting the body or face, but express it by some word connected with the specific colour in use. For example, the painting the face black, as is done to a youth on attaining puberty, is muhkuhdaekawin. This consists of muh-kuh-da, meaning “black,” eka, the form which gives it the verbal significance, “he makes himself black,” with the termination win, constituting the whole a noun. So misquah, “red,” is the root of misquah-ne-ga-zoo, “he is painted red”; misquah-ne-gah-da, “it is painted red.” Oozahwah, “yellow,” gives oo-zah-we-ne-gah-zoo, “he is painted yellow”; with the corresponding terminal change for the neuter. But the word oozahnamahne, from oonah, “the cheek,” is also used for painting the face either red or yellow. Quahnaiy, or gwanai, the word for “beautiful,” is applied to moral as well as physical beauty, e.g. gwanaienene would be used of a fair, honourable dealing man, as well as of one who was handsome or good-looking. But such rhetorical tropes are common to many languages.

I was indebted to the late Silas T. Rand, for upwards of thirty years a missionary among the Micmac Indians of Nova Scotia, for the following illustrative details: “The Micmac is rich in words relating to art, the making and ornamenting of garments, moccasins, snow-shoes, etc., of weapons and implements for domestic use, making pottery and modelling in clay. For building and managing a canoe there are at least seventy-six words. They have words for carving on stone, and also on wood, for marking dressed skins with flower patterns, for carving flowers in stone, for scraping them on birch-bark dishes, for drawing a likeness, making models and patterns, and for working after them. When I was engaged in translating Exodus, and largely dependent on my Indian teacher for the words to express all the parts of the Tabernacle, its coverings and furniture, mortices, tenons, hooks, fillets, loops, bars, pins, sockets, etc., I fully expected to be baffled. What was my surprise to find that there were words in the language by which to express all I needed. Boards, bars, bolts, pillars, poles, rings, everything was made, put together, and my ‘pundit’ an excellent mechanic, when he returned next day to go on with our work, assured me that he had been dreaming about that ‘wigwam’ we had been erecting the previous day, and he was sure he could make such a one. He had the pattern in his head as clearly as Moses had it, after he had seen it up the mountain.” In the Micmac, aweekum is “a drawing,” lit. “I write it,” “I draw it”; essum, “I colour it”; elapskudaaga, “I am carving,” or “cutting stone”; elapskudaam, “I am carving it in stone”; apsk, which here denotes “stone,” is only used in composition; coondow is the word for “stone”; eloksowa, “I am carving in wood”; noojeweekuga, “a painter,” “drawer,” “writer,” lit. “a maker of marks”; aweegasik, “a picture,” lit. “it is marked down,” etc.

The Algonkin root walam, “red,” is the term employed in the Walum Olum, or “Red Score of the Lenape,” which was brought under the notice of the New York Historical Society, in 1848, by Mr. E. G. Squier, as The Bark Record of the Lenni-Lenape. His narrative has been more than once reprinted; but the carefully edited version of this curious Indian ideograph given by Dr. Brinton, in his Lenape and their Legends, will supersede earlier and less accurate versions. The full translation with which the pictographic record of the Walum Olum is accompanied, abundantly suffices to prove that it may be most correctly described as a series of mnemonic signs employed for the purpose of keeping in memory a national chant, of a class very familiar to the students of primitive history. The ballad-epics of the ancient Germans, and the still earlier lays of ancient Rome, the Abanic Duan, and others of the genealogical and historical poems of the Celtic nations, were all of this class; and analogous traditionary chants have been perpetuated among the Maoris of New Zealand. The system of pictography corresponds to that in use among the Ojibways and other Algonkin tribes, including the totems, or sign-names; but it falls far short of true picture-writing. Section IV. records the conquest by the Lenape tribe, of the northern country, which they call “The Snake Land.” Bald Eagle, Beautiful Head, White Owl, Keeping Guard, Snow Bird, and a succession of other chiefs are named, all of whom are more or less graphically indicated by their totems; but a paraphrastic interpretation accompanies them setting forth ideas that have no pictorial representation. Then comes a horizontal line with ten oblique lines rising from it, and three cross-lines below, with the interpretation: “After the Seizer there were ten chiefs and there was much warfare south and north.” Next follows another succession of chiefs, each symbolised with some associated idea. Thus a group of six small circles, arranged upright in two columns, is surmounted by a larger circle, with three oblique lines rising from the top. This is paraphrased: “After him, Corn-Breaker was chief, who brought about the planting of corn.” It is not difficult to imagine in the drawing the conventional representation of an ear of corn; but the major idea can be no more than one suggested to the memory by association. In some instances the picture-writing is more manifest. A horizontal line surmounted by two téepees, or buffalo-skin tents, is “the buffalo land.” In one group, a semicircle with radiating lines, placed on a straight line, is translated: “Let us go together to the east, to the sunrise.” In another case, nearly the same symbol—assumed, no doubt, to represent the sun setting in the ocean,—is rendered, “at the great sea.” It is, indeed, a system of picture-writing; but instead of being abbreviated into word-symbols, it is reduced to mere catch-words or mnemonic signs. Their value would be unquestionable as an aid to memory in the perpetuation of a mythic or historical poem; but, if the tradition were lost, they embody no sufficient record from which to recover it.

Neither the Iroquois nor the Algonkin nation can be pointed to as specially gifted with imitative powers, or in other ways furnishing evidence of any highly developed artistic faculty. They cannot compare in this respect with the Zuñi, or others of the Pueblo Indians, among whom the arts of long-settled, agricultural communities have been developed for purposes of ornament as well as utility; nor is their inferiority less questionable when we compare them with some of the barbarous tribes of the north-west coast, and the neighbouring islands. Their languages confirm this; for while, as Mr. Cushing has shown, the Zuñi language possesses many words relating to art-processes, the Iroquois and Algonkin dialects supply such terms, for the most part, in descriptive holophrasms, and not in primitive roots. Nevertheless, alike in their pottery and carvings, and in their picture-writing, they show a degree of artistic capacity of which few traces are found in Europe’s Neolithic age.

In the Ojibway, oozhebegawin is used indiscriminately for “writing, drawing, painting,” wazhebeegad, for “a man who writes, draws.” In combination with muh-ze-ne, “figure, form,” such words are in use as muhzenebeégawin, “a painting, drawing”; muhzenebeégawenene (M.), muhzenebeégawequa (F.), “a painter, an artist”; muhzenebeégun, “a picture.” “To carve,” or “engrave on a rock,” is muhzeneko; muhzenekojegun, “a sculptor’s chisel”; muhzenekoda, “it is carved,” etc. Again with wahbegun, “clay,” such holophrasms are obtained as wahbegunoonahgunekawenene, “a man who makes earthen vessels, a potter,” wahbeguhega, “a worker in clay,” lit. “I work with clay.”^[110]

In previous remarks on the main subject of this paper, the development of the artistic faculty has been noted as, in many cases, an exceptional manifestation of intellectual activity, alike in ancient and modern barbarous races. The striking contrast between the richly fluent forms of the language, and the infantile condition of this people in relation to so much else, including metallurgy, and the application of the arts generally to the practical requirements of life, furnishes a no less interesting illustration of intellectual development fostered by special influences in another direction. The habitual practice of oratory made the Iroquois acute reasoners; and their language abounds in abstract terms to a degree altogether surprising in an uncivilised race. The purposes of the rhetorician also encouraged the tropical use of literal terms. It is not, therefore, difficult to understand how the primary sense of the verb “to track” or “trace out” should ultimately yield the meaning of “drawing” or “sketching,” and so finally of “painting.” On the other hand, it abundantly coincides with the instinctive use of the imitative faculty as a means of conveying definite ideas to others, that in the Iroquois, as in other languages, the same terms are used to express the idea of making a mark, drawing, or writing. The primitive hieroglyphics, from whence our phonetic alphabets have come, were first literal drawings, and then their abbreviations employed to express associated ideas. An ideographic purpose appears to underlie the earliest efforts of imitative art.

It has already been noted in treating of pre-Aryan American men that throughout the northern continent, from the Arctic circle to the Mexican Gulf, no trace has been recovered of the previous existence of anything that properly admits of the term “native civilisation.” The rude arts of Europe’s Stone age belong to a period lying far behind its remotest traditions; unless we appeal to the mythic allusions of Hesiod, or to such poetic imaginings as the Prometheus of Æschylus. But all available evidence serves to show that the condition of the native tribes throughout the northern continent has never advanced beyond the stage which finds its aptest illustration in the arts of their Stone period, including the rudimentary efforts at turning to account their ample resources of native copper without the use of fire.

But this uniformity in the condition of the aborigines, and the consequent resemblance in their arts, habits, and mode of life, has been the fruitful source of misleading assumptions. Everywhere the European explorer met only rude hunting and warring tribes, exhibiting such slight variations in all that first attracts the eye of the most observant traveller, that an exaggerated idea of their ethnical uniformity was the natural result. In the systematisings of the ethnologist, the American type was classed apart as at once uniform and distinctive; and, strange as it may now seem, this idea found nowhere such ready favour as among those who had the fullest access to the evidence by which its truth could be tested. It was the most comprehensive induction of the author of Crania Americana, as the fruit of his conscientious researches in American craniology. The authors of Indigenous Races of the Earth and Types of Mankind, no less unhesitatingly affirmed that “identical characters pervade all the American races, ancient and modern, over the whole continent.”^[111] In this they were sustained by the high authority of Agassiz, who, after discussing in his Provinces of the Animal World, and their relation to Types of Man, the fauna peculiar to the American continent, and pointing out the much greater uniformity of its natural productions, when its twin continents are compared with those of the eastern hemisphere, thus summed up the result of his investigations: “With these facts before us, we may expect that there should be no great diversity among the tribes of man inhabiting this continent; and indeed the most extensive investigation of their peculiarities has led Dr. Morton to consider them as constituting but a single race, from the confines of the Esquimaux down to the southernmost extremity of the continent. But, at the same time, it should be remembered that, in accordance with the zoological character of the whole realm, this race is divided into an infinite number of small tribes, presenting more or less difference one from another.” It was natural and reasonable that the men of the sixteenth century should believe in Calibans, or Ewaipanoma, “the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” America was to them, in the most literal sense, another world; and it was easier for them to think of it as peopled with such monstrosities than with human beings like ourselves. But it is curious to note in this nineteenth century the lingering traces of the old sentiment; and to see men of science still finding it difficult to emancipate themselves from the idea that this continent is so essentially another world, that it is inconceivable to them that the races by which it is peopled should bear any affinity to themselves or to others of the Old World. American ethnologists long clung to the idea of an essentially distinct indigenous race; and Dr. Nott, Dr. Meigs, and other investigators welcomed every confirmation of the view of Dr. Morton as to the occupation of the whole American continent by one peculiar type from which alone the Eskimo were to be excepted, as an immigrant element, possibly—according to the ingenious speculations of one distinguished student of science,—of remotest European antiquity. Professor Huxley in an address to the Ethnological Society in 1869, suggests hypothetically, that the old Mexican and South American races represent the true American stock; and that the Red Indians of North America may be the product of an intermixture of the indigenous native race with the Eskimo. It is noticeable, at any rate, that nearly all writers, however widely differing on other points, follow Humboldt in classing the Eskimo apart as a distinct type. He remarks in his preface to his American Researches, that, “except those which border the polar circle, the nations of America form a single race characterised by the formation of the skull, the colour of the skin, the extreme thinness of the beard, and the straight glossy hair.” Some of the characteristics thus noted are undoubtedly widely prevalent; but the head-form, or “formation of the skull,” is the most important; and a careful comparison of the skulls of different tribes has long since modified the opinion, expressed by the great traveller and reasserted by distinguished American ethnologists.

In reality, were the typical feature most insisted on as universal as it was assumed to be, it would furnish the strongest argument for classifying the predominant Asiatic and American types as one. All the points appealed to suggest affinity to the Asiatic Mongol. But so far from the Eskimo standing apart as a markedly exceptional type, if due allowance be made for the prolonged influence of an Arctic climate, the Huron-Iroquois approximate to them in some very notable ethnical features. The dolichocephalic head-form, especially, is common to them, and to the Algonkin and other Northern Indians. Of those Dr. Latham remarks: “The Iroquois and Algonkins exhibit in the most typical form the characteristics of the North American Indians as exhibited in the earliest descriptions, and are the two families upon which the current notions respecting the physiognomy, habits, and moral and intellectual powers of the so-called Red Race are chiefly founded.” Of the former, Mr. Parkman, who has studied their later history with the minutest care, says: “In this remarkable family of tribes occur the fullest developments of Indian character, and the most conspicuous examples of Indian intelligence. If the higher traits popularly ascribed to the race are not to be found here, they are to be found nowhere.”^[112] To this typical American race, accordingly, and to some of its peculiarly distinctive usages, special attention is here directed.

The Iroquois were an important branch of the great stock which included also the Hurons, or Wyandots, the native historical race of Canada. But divided as the two were throughout the whole period of French Canadian history by the bitterest antagonism, it is convenient to speak of them under the term of Huron-Iroquois. In reviewing the history of this indigenous stock, with the suggestions prompted by their peculiar characteristics, it is desirable not only to note the physical geography of the country which they occupied, as a region of forest and lakes, but, still more, to keep in view this fact as a predominant characteristic of the continent, and as one important factor in the evolution of whatever may seem to be peculiar in the forest tribes of North America.

The effects resulting from the physical features of a country on the development and intermingling of its races can nowhere be wisely overlooked. Even within the limits of the British Islands the influences of mountain and lowlands: of the fertile stretches of Kent and the valley of the Thames, the fens of Lincolnshire, the moorlands of Northumbria, and the Welsh and Scottish Highlands, have largely contributed to the perpetuation, if not in some degree to the development, of ethnical distinctions and the diversities in language.

In this respect Britain is an epitome of Europe, with its great mountain ranges and detached peninsulas, by means of which races have been isolated within well-defined areas, and their languages and other distinctive peculiarities preserved. Russia alone, of all European countries, presents analogies to Northern Asia as a region favourable to nomadic life; and in so far as its history differs from that of the continent at large, it accords with such physical conditions. Throughout the whole historic period, as doubtless in prehistoric times, the great chain of mountains reaching from the western spur of the Pyrenees to the Balkans has influenced European progress; while the chief navigable river, the Danube, traversing the continent through one uniform temperate zone, has tended still further to the perpetuation of certain distinctive ethnical characteristics in Central Europe. In all its most important geographical features, the northern continent of America presents a striking contrast to this. An isosceles triangle with its base within the Arctic circle, it tapers to a narrow isthmus towards the equator. Its great mountain chain runs from north to south, and in near proximity to the Pacific coast; and its chief navigable river, rising within the Canadian Dominion, and receiving as its tributaries rivers draining vast regions on either hand, traverses twenty degrees of latitude before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. A lower range of highlands towards the Atlantic seaboard forms the eastern boundary of the great interior plain. But the Alleghanies or Appalachian system of mountains, though they may be said to extend from the St. Lawrence to the Mexican Gulf, rise only at a few points, as in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to any great elevation. They form rather a long plateau, intersected by wide valleys, diversifying the landscape, without constituting strongly defined barriers or lines of demarcation. As a whole, the continent of North America, eastward from the Rocky Mountains, may be described as a level area, so slightly modified by any elevated regions throughout its whole extent, from the Arctic circle to the Gulf of Mexico, as to present no other impediment except its forests to the wanderings of nomadic tribes. It is interlaced with rivers, and diversified everywhere with lakes, alike available for navigation and for fishing; and, until the intrusion of European immigrants, its forests and prairies abounded with game far in excess of the wants of its population. Everything thus tended to perpetuate the condition of nomadic hunter tribes. This stage of native American history inevitably drew to a close under the influence of European institutions and civilisation; but it is interesting to note, that the same absence of any well-defined geographical limitations of area, which tended to perpetuate the nomadic habits of the savage, has aided in consolidating the great confederacy of the United States, and maintaining an ethnical and political conformity throughout the northern continent in striking contrast to the diversities in race and political institutions in Europe.

History and native traditions alike confirm the idea that the valley of the St. Lawrence was the habitat of the Huron-Iroquois stock as far back as evidence can be appealed to. The Huron traditions tell of a time when the Province of Quebec was the home of the race eastward to the sea; while those of three at least of the members of the Iroquois confederacy in legendary fashion claimed their birth from the soil south of the great river. When the French explorers, under the leadership of Jacques Cartier, first entered the St. Lawrence, in 1535, they found at Stadaconé and Hochelaga—the old native sites now occupied by the cities of Quebec and Montreal,—a population apparently of the Huron-Iroquois stock; and, in so far as reliance may be placed on their traditions, Canada was then populous throughout the whole valley of the St. Lawrence with industrious native tribes, the representatives of a race that had occupied the same region for unnumbered centuries. “Some fanciful tales of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain; of a migration to the eastern seaboard; and of a subsequent return to the country of the lakes and rivers, where they finally settled, comprise,” says Brownell,^[113] “most that is noticeable in the native traditions of the Six Nations prior to the grand confederation.” But the value of such traditionary transmission of national history among unlettered tribes has received repeated confirmation; and incidents in the history of their famous league, perpetuated with circumstantial minuteness in the traditions of the Iroquois, are assignable apparently to the fifteenth century. The older event of the overthrow of the Alligéwi, in the Ohio valley, of which independent traditional records have been handed down by the Lenni-Lenape, or Delawares, and by the Iroquois, is now believed to be correctly assignable to a date nearly contemporaneous with the assumption of the authority of Bretwalda of the Heptarchy by Egbert of Wessex,—that memorable step in the fusion of “nations” not greatly more important than those of the Iroquois league, until their divisions in speech and polity were effaced in the unity of the English people. As to “the fanciful tale of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain,” it is simply a literal rendering of the old Greek metaphor of the autochthones, or children of the soil, symbolised by the Athenians wearing the grasshopper in their hair; and is by no means peculiar to the Iroquois. Mr. Horatio Hale derived from Manderong, an old Wyandot chief, the story, as narrated to him by the Hurons of Lorette. They took him, he said, to a mountain, and showed him the opening in its side from whence the progenitors of the people emerged, when they “first came out of the ground.”^[114] The late Huron chief, Tahourenché, or François-Xavier Picard, communicated to me the same legendary tradition of the indigenous origin of his people; telling me, though with a smile, that they came out of the side of a mountain between Quebec and the great sea. He connected this with other incidents, all pointing to a traditional belief that the northern shores of the lower St. Lawrence were the original home of the race; and he spoke of certain ancient events in the history of his people as having occurred when they lived beside the big sea. The earliest authentic reference to this tradition occurs in the Relations for 1636, where Brebeuf, after a brief allusion to certain of their magical songs and dances, says: “The origin of all such mysteries is assigned by them to a being of superhuman stature, who was wounded in the forehead by one of their nation, at the time when they lived near the sea.” The references to a migration from the seaboard obviously point to one of those incidents in the life of the nation which marked for them an epoch like the Hegira of the Arabs. When Champlain followed Cartier nearly seventy years later he found only a few Algonkins in their birch-bark wigwams, where the palisaded towns of the Huron-Iroquois had stood. But no Algonkin legend claims this as their early home. The invariable tradition of the Ojibways points to the Lake Superior region and the country stretching towards Hudson Bay as the ancestral home of the Algonkin tribes.

Such information as can thus be gleaned from a variety of independent sources, as from the somewhat confused yet trustworthy narrative of David Cusick, the Tuscarora historian, and from Peter Dooyentate, the Wyandot historian, all leads to the same conclusion. From remote and altogether pre-Columbian centuries, the Hurons and other allied tribes—the occupants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of various detached portions of the country north of the St. Lawrence and eastward of the Georgian Bay,—appear to have been in possession of the whole region to which their oldest traditions pointed as the cradle of the race; while nations of the Algonkin stock lay beyond them to the north-west. The great river and the lakes from whence it flows into the lower valley formed a well-defined southern boundary for affiliated tribes; but the first Dutch and English explorers of the Hudson, and of the tract of country which now constitutes the western part of the State of New York, found the river-valleys and lake shores in occupation of the Iroquois confederacy, then consisting of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. These constituted the five nations of the famous Iroquois league. But the Hurons of Canada, with whom they were latterly at deadly feud, appear to have been the oldest representatives of the common race, and were still in occupation of their ancestral home when Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence. The same race had spread far to the south; and its representatives, in detached groups, long continued to perpetuate its influence. These included the Conestogas or Andastes, the Andastogues, the Carantouans, the Cherohakahs or Nottoways, the Tuscaroras, and others, under various names. It is not always easy to recognise the same tribe under its widely dissimilar designations. The Susquehannocks of the English and the Minquas of the Dutch, appear to be the Andastes under other designations, and Champlain’s Carantouans may have been the Eries. Under those and other names the Huron-Iroquois stock extended to the country of the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. Still farther south Gallatin surmised, from linguistic evidence, a connection between the Cherokees and the Iroquois.^[115] This fact Mr. Hale has placed beyond doubt; and having detected in the language of the former a grammatical structure mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocabulary is to a great extent foreign, he is inclined to think that we thus recover traces of a people, far south in Alabama and Georgia, the descendants of refugees of the conquered Alligéwi, adopted into one of the nations of their Iroquois conquerors.^[116]

From one after another of the outlying southern offshoots of the common stock, additions were made from time to time, to restore the numbers of the decimated Iroquois. Westward of the confederacy was the country of the Eries, an offshoot of the Seneca nation, occupying the southern shore of the great lake which perpetuates their name. Immediately to the north of the Eries, within the Canadian frontier, the Attiwendaronks, or Neuters, occupied the peninsula of Niagara, while the Tiontates or Petuns, and other tribes of the same stock, were settled in the fertile region between Lakes Erie and Huron. In 1714, the Tuscaroras, when driven by the English out of North Carolina, were welcomed by their Iroquois kinsmen, and received into the league which thenceforth bore the name of the Six Nations. Towards the middle of the same century the waste of war made them ready to welcome any additions to their numbers; and the Tuteloes and Nanticokes, both apparently Algonkin, furnished fresh accessions to the diminished numbers of the confederacy, but without taking their place as distinct nations.

But of all the nations of the stock thus widely spread westward and southward, the Hurons are the native historical race of Canada, intimately identified with incidents of its early settlement and of friendly intercourse with La Nouvelle France. Their language is now recognised as the oldest form of the common speech of the Huron-Iroquois, and it is not creditable to Canadian philologists that its grammar still remains unrepresented in any accurate printed form. The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec did, indeed, publish in its Transactions, in 1831, the translation of a Latin MS., compiled with much industry by a missionary who had laboured among the Hurons of Lorette, and whose anonymous work was found amongst the papers of the mission. But it is the production of one ignorant of the science of language, and gives no adequate idea either of the grammatical structure or of the variety and richness of the Huron tongue.

The languages or dialects spoken by many native Indian tribes have undoubtedly perished with the races to which they pertained; but the numerous Huron-Iroquois dialects still existing, not only in written form, but as living tongues, afford valuable materials for ethnical study. The history of other Indian tribes abundantly accounts for the multiplication of a minute diversity of languages so specially characteristic of the American continent, with the endless subdivisions of its indigenous population into petty tribes, kept apart by internecine feuds. The number of native American languages is estimated by Vater, in his Linguarum Totius Orbis Index, at about five hundred. But the question forthwith arises: What shall be regarded as constituting a language? For, in the wanderings of little bands of Indian nomads, and the adoption of refugees from disbanded tribes, dialects multiply indefinitely. Nearly six hundred of such are catalogued by Mr. Bancroft, in his Native Races of the Pacific States, as spoken between Alaska and the Isthmus of Panama.

Until recently the tendency has been to assume an underlying unity of speech for the whole American languages, based on the polysynthetic or holophrastic characteristic ascribed to the whole; just as by an exaggerated estimate of the prevalence of a predominant head-form, one physical type was long assumed to characterise the American race from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps, so far as language is concerned, the present tendency is towards the opposite extreme. Major Powell, the chief of the Ethnographical Bureau at Washington, recognises eighty groups of languages in North America, between which no affinity is thus far apparent. Fifty-five of those he believes to be satisfactorily determined as distinct stocks. On the other hand, Professor Whitney, after noticing the complexity of the inquiry when directed to the native American languages, thus proceeds: “Yet it is the confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a fundamental unity lies at the base of all these infinitely varying forms of speech; that they may be, and probably are, all descended from a single parent language.”^[117]

Here then is a field for much useful research, with the promise of valuable results. The subject is rendered more important owing to the fact that, of nearly all the nations of the North American continent, their languages are the only surviving memorials of the race. Already, under the efficient supervision of the Ethnographic Bureau of the United States, systematic contributions are being secured for this important branch of knowledge, so far as their own geographical area is concerned. A no less important area is embraced in the Dominion of Canada, and the attention of the Government is now directed to the necessity for timely action in this matter. In the North-West, and in British Columbia, languages are disappearing and races becoming extinct. Mr. Hale has contributed to the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions a valuable monogram on the Tutelo tribe and language, derived mainly from Nikonha, the last full-blood Tutelo, who survived till upwards of a hundred years of age. He was married to a Cayuga woman, and lived among her people on their Grand river reserve. “My only knowledge of the Tuteloes,” says Mr. Hale, “had been derived from the few notices comprised in Gallatin’s Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, where they are classed with the nations of the Huron-Iroquois stock. At the same time the distinguished author, with the scientific caution which marked all his writings, is careful to mention that no vocabulary of the language was known. That which was now obtained showed, beyond question, that the language was totally distinct from the Huron-Iroquois tongues, and that it was closely allied to the language of the Dakota family.”^[118] But for the timely exertion of a philological student, this interesting link in the history of the Huron-Iroquois relations with affiliated tribes would have been lost beyond recall.

The history of the Huron-Iroquois race, and especially of the Six Nation Indians, since the settlement of the main body for the past century on their reserves on the Grand river, in the Province of Ontario, curiously illustrates the pertinacity with which they have cherished the dialectic varieties of a common tongue. But while the essential differences of language everywhere constitute one of the most obvious distinctions of race, it is interesting to note the recognition by the Indians of affinities of dialects, and even remote kinship based on such evidence; as in the readmission of the Tuscaroras to the Iroquois family of nations. According to Brebeuf, the kinship of the Attiwendaronks of the Niagara peninsula was recognised by the Hurons in that designation which classed them as a “people of a language a little different.”^[119] Peter Jones Kahkewaquonaby, a civilised Ojibway, adopted into the Mohawk nation, in speaking of the traditions of the Indians as to their own origin, says: “All the information I have been able to gain in relation to the question amounts to the following. Many, many winters ago the Great Spirit, Keche-Manedoo, created the Indians. Every nation speaking a different language is a second creation, but all were made by the same Supreme Being.”^[120]

Among the races of the northern continent, none east of the Rocky Mountains more fitly represent their special characteristics than the great Huron-Iroquois family. Their language is remarkable for its compass and elaborate grammatical structure; and the numerous dialects of the common mother tongue furnish evidence of migration and conquest over a wide region eastward of the Mississippi. To such philological evidence many inquirers are now turning for a clue to the origin of the races of the New World, and for the recovery of proofs of their affinity to one or other of the Old World stocks. Professor Whitney, after dwelling on the “exaggeratedly agglutinative type” of the ancient Iberian language, and its isolation among the essentially dissimilar languages of Aryan Europe, thus proceeds: “The Basque forms a suitable stepping-stone from which to enter the peculiar linguistic domain of the New World, since there is no other dialect of the Old World which so much resembles in structure the American languages”^[121]; not indeed, as he adds, that they are all of accordant form; for he pronounces the grouping of them in a single great family as “a classification of ignorance.” The possibilities of ancient communication between the opposite shores of the Atlantic, and the migration of colonists of the New World from the Mediterranean Sea, have already been discussed in dealing with the legend of the Lost Atlantis. Great indeed as is the interval of time therein implied, it would not suffice to erase all traces of affinity of languages. But it would be vain to hope for any historical guidance recoverable from the oldest of Iroquois legends. If, moreover, Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phœnician, or other of the world’s gray fathers, transplanted to America the germs of its long indigenous stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilisation north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it by any means an established truth that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great antiquity. Their metallurgy was at a crude, yet suggestive, stage at which it was not likely to be long arrested. The same may be said of their hieroglyphic records; though they certainly present some highly significant analogies to the Chinese phase of word-writing, calculated, along with other aspects of resemblance to that stage of partial, yet long-enduring, civilisation of which China is the Asiatic exemplar, to modify our estimate of the possible duration of Central and Southern American civilisation. Nevertheless the assumption of an antiquity in any degree approximating to that of Egypt seems wholly irreconcilable with the evidence. Their architecture was barbaric, though imposing from the scale on which their great temples and palaces were built. In Central America especially, the aggregation of numerous ill-lighted little chambers, like honey-comb cells excavated out of the huge pile, is strongly suggestive of affinity to the Casas Grandes, and the Pueblos of the Zuñi; and this is confirmed by the correspondence traceable between many of their architectural details and the ornamentation of the Pueblo pottery.

The astronomy and the calendars, both of Mexico and Peru, with their detailed methods of recording their divisions of time, are all suggestive of an immature phase of civilisation in the very stage of its emergence from barbarism, modified, in some cases, by the recent acquisition of certain arts. As to the peculiar phase of Mexican art, and whatever other evidence of progress Mexico supplies, they appear to me no more than natural products of the first successful intrusion of the barbarians of the northern continent on the seats of tropical civilisation. Certain it seems, at least, that if an earlier civilisation had ever existed in the north, or if the representatives of any Old World type were present there in numbers for any length of time, some traces of their lost arts must long since have come to light.