SKETCH OF HORATIO HALE. 405 



Confederacy (wlio, though belonging to the Algonkin family, 

 may from their character and achievements be styled the Iro- 

 quois of the Northwest), was prepared by Mr. Hale, partly from 

 his own minutes, gathered in Oregon in former years, and partly 

 from materials supplied by his correspondence with two highly 

 esteemed missionaries, Catholic and Methodist the Eev. Father 

 Albert Lacombe and the Rev. Dr. John McLean. This report 

 was presented in 1885, and proved of so much interest that before 

 it appeared in the association's volume it was published in the 

 English periodical Nature, and was thence reprinted in the 

 American Popular Science Monthly. In this report, as well as in 

 his annotations on the third report, prepared partly by his expe- 

 rienced collaborator, the Rev. E. F. Wilson (well known as the 

 founder of the Shingwauk Home at the Sault Ste. Marie), Mr. 

 Hale sought to show that the remarkable superiority of the 

 Blackfoot Indians to the other Algonkins is due to an admixture 

 of blood with the Kootenays of British Columbia, whose singular 

 mental endowments are set forth in two of the subsequent reports, 

 the sixth and eighth. All the reports after the third, with the 

 exception of the eighth, which is by Dr. A. F. Chamberlain, 

 formerly of Toronto University and now of Clark University, 

 Worcester, Mass., have been prepared by Dr. Franz Boas, for- 

 merly editor of Science, who, like Mr. Wilson and Dr. Chamber- 

 lain, was invited by Mr. Hale to carry on the investigations. 

 The reports, usually prefaced by introductory remarks of the 

 editor, have been of considerable length, some of them compris- 

 ing many pictorial illustrations, and have proved a conspicuous 

 feature of the recent volumes of the British Association. They 

 have been considered of so much importance that the Canadian 

 Parliament has twice supplemented by considerable money grants 

 the sums liberally appropriated for the committee's work by the 

 British Association. The fifth report contained a colored " lin- 

 guistic map " of British Columbia, prepared at Mr. Hale's sug- 

 gestion, and supplementing his ethnographical map of Oregon, 

 already noticed. This British Columbian map showed five lin- 

 guistic stocks, additional to the twelve stocks comprised in the 

 Oregon map, thus evidencing the existence of no less than sev- 

 enteen language families in an area not larger than the British 

 Islands. This remarkable fact, with some similar instances in 

 other parts of the world, offered one of the most perplexing 

 enigmas of philological science. 



This enigma Mr. Hale undertook to solve in an address de- 

 livered in 188G before the Section of Anthropology in the Ameri- 

 can Association for the Advancement of Science, of which 

 association he had been elected one of the vice-presidents and 

 chairman of that section. The address was on The Origin of 



