SKETCH OF HORATIO HALE. 401 



SKETCH OF HORATIO HALE. 



GREAT advances have been made by ethnologists of the 

 present generation in the study of the languages of the 

 American aborigines and in the investigation of primitive lin- 

 guistics. The pioneer in these researches, one whose efforts have 

 been among the most fruitful, the one who perhaps has so far 

 gone deepest into the investigation, was Horatio Hale, who died 

 at Clinton, Ontario, December 29, 1896. " By his death," says his 

 fellow-student in this subject. Dr. Franz Boas, in The Critic, 

 *' ethnology has lost a man who contributed more to our knowl- 

 edge of the human races than perhaps any other single student." 

 The sketch that follows was carefully prepared nearly two years 

 before Mr. Hale's death. Although a few changes of form might 

 have been proper to adapt it to the present date, we prefer to 

 publish it as it was left, only inserting a few words respecting 

 Mr. Hale's distinguished mother. 



Hale, Horatio, M. A., ethnologist and lawyer, was born on 

 May 3, 1817, at Newport, N. H. His father, David Hale, was a 

 leading lawyer of that town, and his mother, Sarah Josepha, after 

 her husband's death in 1822, became well known in American lit- 

 erature as a highly esteemed author and editor. [Her nursery 

 poem, Mary had a Little Lamb, has endeared her to children's 

 hearts, and other fugitive productions of hers have become 

 widely familiar. She was for one year less than a half century 

 editor of the Ladies' Magazine, Boston, and, after its merger in 

 that periodical, of Godey's Ladies' Book, Philadelphia, which 

 had an immense circulation for its day and was a living force in 

 shaping the tastes and aims of American women. She was one 

 of the earliest advocates of the advancement and higher educa- 

 tion of women, and was the virtual founder of the engagement of 

 women in foreign missionary service and of the Woman's Union 

 Missionary Society for heathen lands. Through her urgency 

 the women of New England contributed fifty thousand dollars 

 toward the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument; and 

 mainly through her urgency and correspondence with Governors 

 of States and Presidents of the United States Thanksgiving Day 

 was made a national festival.] Their son showed an early in- 

 clination for the study of languages, and particularly of the 

 Oriental and aboriginal American tongues. At the age of sixteen 

 he entered Harvard College. In the following year, when a party 

 of Indians from Maine came to Massachusetts and encamped for 

 a time on the college grounds, he took the opportunity of collect- 

 ing a vocabulary of their dialect. This, with some accompany- 

 ing remarks, was printed in 1831 in a small pamphlet, which was 



VOL. LI. 31 



