Section IL, 1896. [ 41 ] Traks. R. S. C. 



III. — The Ancient Literature of America. 



By John Campbell, LL.D. 



(Read May 20, 1896.) 



The anthropologist or student of man, may investigate him as he 

 would any other object of natural history, classifying him with tail-less 

 iipes and erect bears, noting the form of his skull, the angle of his face, 

 the colour of his skin, and the texture of his hair. To such a biologist 

 man is an animal and nothing more. Another enters the field of sociology, 

 viewing the intelligent animal in his relations with his fellows and with 

 nature at large. Here a thousand interesting features present themselves, 

 în domestic and tribal organization, marriage and funeral ceremonies, 

 rites and superstitions, manners and customs, house building, domestication 

 of animals, the chase and war, husbandry, the manufacture of canoes, 

 pottery, and implements of many kinds. A third, calling himself a phil- 

 ologist, discovers that the animal talks, although Mr. Garner, who has 

 been making special studies in Africa, in his recent book called "The 

 Speech of Monkeys," contends that language is not peculiar to human 

 beings. There is one way of communicating thought which uncivilized 

 man shares with the brute, and this has been very fully illustrated by the 

 late Colonel Garrick Mallery in his treatise on Sign and Gesture Language. 

 Mr. Garner has pei-haps succeeded in detecting something approaching to 

 articulation in the cries of apes, but, until he can formulate a monkey 

 grammar, the soul of speech will be wanting in his system. Molière's 

 Bourgeois Gentilhomme spoke prose without knowing it, and wild tribes 

 of men are ignorantly guilty of grammar, and, what is more strange, of 

 good grammar. An English child is reported as answering an intimation 

 that her mother wanted her, with the words, '' Her aint callin' me ; us 

 don't belong to she," in spite of the board schools. Such a thing would 

 be next to impossible in the case of an American Jndian child, who 

 unconsciously uses most correct speech, and in narration employs a style 

 elevated and ornate. The occurrence of ungrammatical sentences in the 

 language of a native almost invariably marks him as a foreigner who has 

 acquired it late in life. 



In conversation with the grammatical Indian, the philologist discovers 

 that, unlike the knife-grinder who said, 



" Story, God bless you, I have none to tell," 

 he has a large collection of stories. Some of these are beautiful, as 

 well in their spirit as in their rhetorical and poetical forms ; but a great 

 many are not. I do not know the precise number of volumes of Indian 



