410 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ity of tlie fertile and rapidly improving district throiigli whicli it 

 passes." Mr. Hale was an honorary or corresponding member of 

 many learned societies, including, besides those mentioned in the 

 foregoing sketch, the Anthropological Societies of Washington 

 and Vienna, the Polynesian Society of Wellington, New Zealand, 

 the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, the 

 New England Historico- Genealogical Society, and several others. 



A few days before his death Mr. Hale was notified by the 

 Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of 

 Science that the Council of that body desired him to act as vice- 

 president of the Section of Anthropology at the next meeting, at 

 Toronto in 1897. The letter declining to accept this position, on 

 account of failing health, was one of the last from his pen. 



[Mr. Hale's first scientific publication was the first systematic 

 contribution to the study of the Malaisian and Polynesian lan- 

 guages, and cast a flood of light on the subject at the outset. 

 His last published contribution presented evidences that the 

 native tribes of America possessed at the time of the discovery 

 a higher degree of civilization than any one had before ascribed 

 to them, evincing " intellectual and moral faculties of no mean 

 order " ; that they had established forms of government, a real 

 money, " the elements of a written language, widely diffused, and 

 employed especially in preserving, with happy effect, the memory 

 of treaties of peace and alliance"; and a very high degree of 

 generally diffused comfort. In preparing this paper for publi- 

 cation in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great 

 Britain and Ireland, for February, 1897, Mr. E. B, Tylor mentions 

 having received, while writing, the intelligence of Mr. Hale's 

 death with regret, but hardly with surprise, and adds : " The tone 

 of his letters for months past had been that of a man looking 

 toward the end of his work in life, and anxious to settle finally 

 all matters he had much at heart. Among these were his investi- 

 gations into the history of his friends the Iroquois and Hurons, 

 to which he had given so much labor, and of which his last 

 studies^ undertaken to elucidate their native records, form a fit 

 completion." At the conclusion of his tribute to Mr. Hale in The 

 Critic, Dr. Franz Boas says : " His wise counsel, his amiable 

 guidance, his kindly friendship, insure a grateful memory to him 

 whose works students of ethnology and of linguistics will admire 

 for all time to come. Science has lost a worker to whose enthu- 

 siasm and faithful labor we owe much ; mankind has lost a man 

 whose wisdom, kindness, and steadfastness it is hard to lack."] 



