4o8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



edge, and, in spite of the hackneyed disapproval with which 

 reviewers receive reprints of essays published in periodicals, it is 

 much to be regretted that his essays have never been published 

 in a collected form." In the North American Review for July, 

 1892, the distinguished President of McGill University, Sir J. 

 William Dawson, refers to this " remarkable paper of Mr. 

 Hale's " as " one which should commend itself to the study of 

 every biblical scholar and archseologist." He adds : " In this 

 paper Mr. Hale maintains the importance of language as a 

 ground of ethnological classification, and there was his wide 

 knowledge of the languages of American aborigines and other 

 rude races to show that the grammatical complexity and logical 

 perfection of those languages imply a high intellectual capacity 

 in their original framers. . . . On similar grounds he shows us 

 that it is not in the outlying barbarous races that we are to look 

 for truly primitive man, since here we have merely degraded 

 types, and that the primitive centers of man and language must 

 have been in the old historic lands of western Asia and northern 

 Africa." 



In 1893 Mr. Hale was elected President of the American Folk- 

 lore Society. He had previously contributed to the society's 

 quarterly journal a series of articles on Huron Folklore from 

 materials gathered in his visit to the "Underdon Reserve," on 

 the Detroit River opposite to southern Michigan the reserve 

 appropriated to the small band of Wyandot Indians, less than a 

 hundred, who alone in Canada retained the language, and with it 

 the traditions, of the once numerous and powerful Huron people. 

 In the same year he was invited to attend the International Con- 

 gress of Anthropology, which was convened for the World's Co- 

 lumbian Exposition at Chicago. To this congress he contributed a 

 paper entitled The Fall of Hochelaga, a Study of Popular Tradition, 

 which appeared in the volume of Memoirs of the congress, and 

 also in the Journal of the American Folklore Society for March, 

 1894. In this paper he was enabled, by employing the same 

 methods of research and analysis by which he had in early life 

 traced out the Polynesian migrations of two millenniums, to elu- 

 cidate, by the aid of traditions which had been preserved for more 

 than four centuries among the Canadian Hurons, a singular his- 

 torical mystery, which had long perplexed the writers of North 

 American annals. When the explorer Jacques Cartier, in 1535, 

 discovered and ascended the St. Lawrence River, he found its 

 shores, from what is now the site of Quebec to what is now the 

 site of Montreal, occupied by what he styled the "kingdom of 

 Hochelaga." Its " great king and lord," from his capital at the 

 last-named place, ruled over several communities of partly civil- 

 ized Indians, who spoke a language of the Huron- Iroquois stock. 



