44 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Fast rains descend on earth's star-strewn tioor, 



The tears by the Spirit slied, 

 On the fallen gems of heaven they pour, 

 Till the forest beholds their light no more, 

 But, borne away to the great lake's shore. 



They lie in its watery bed. 



Long weeks pass by, and the heavenly seeds. 



When the sun and the southern star 

 Pour down the fierce heat that their union breeds, 

 Spring forth, clad in beauty, among the weeds. 

 Like the glorious blossoms that deck the meads 



Of the Spirit Land afar. 



'Tis a sacred tlower, and the Indian boy 



Well knows whence its fragrance was given ; 

 Xor ever forgets, in his heedless joy. 

 That the White Water Lily is no child's toy, 

 But the union of earth's most pure alloy 



With the silvery glory of heaven. 



And still in the far-off northern sky 



Where the Swan and the Eagle glow. 

 The Magic Arrow is seen to fly, 

 From budding spring till the lilies die. 

 And each star looks down with a loving eye 



On its sister orbs below. 



To analyse the folk-lore of our many Indian tribes would be a 

 pleasant and by no means unprofitable task. We would find several of 

 ^sop's fables in their stories, and most of the old nursery favourites, 

 such as Jack the Giant Killer, his namesake of the Beanstalk, Cinderella, 

 St. George and the Dragon, Tom Thumb, Blue Beard, and Beauty and 

 the Beast, showing that the whole world is kin, and that these stories 

 told at the camp-fire arose in very ancient days, when the population of 

 the world was small, and was confined to a limited area between the Tigris 

 and the Nile. That the coincidences in tales told thousands of miles 

 apart are the result of the natural laws of human thought, and that the 

 tales themselves are poetical nature myths, glorifying the sun and similar 

 objects are theories that may satisfy Sir George Cox, the author of " The 

 Mythology of the Aryan Nations." and his German teachers, but theories 

 utterly unsatisfactory to Andrew Lang and to anyone who has subjected 

 the so-called myths to anything like scientific analysis and comparison. 

 The ancestors of our American Indians once squatted round the Sphinx 

 and the ruins of the Tower of Babel, where camp-fires were a superfluity, 

 telling these same old tales and grunting approbation of the narrator's 

 skill. 



It is a trite saying that there is nothing great on earth Init man, 

 and that there is nothing great in man but mind. The copious vocabu- 

 lary, the complex grammatical forms, of our Indian languages exhibit 

 mind, and mind of no small cultivation. The stories told in their 



