PROCEEDINGS FOR 1886. XVII 
We already owe to the “Lexique de langue iroquoise,” and to the “ Etude philologique sur 
quelques langues sauvage de l'Amérique,” of Abbé Cuoq, valuable help to the study of the Iroquois 
and Algonquin tongues. We are no less indebted to the Rev. Father Lacombe for the like aid in 
’ 
his “ Dictionnaire et grammaire de la langue des Cris.” But the frontiers of Quebee are still oceu- 
pied by native tribes little affected by the civilization of European intruders, and beyond this, the 
Eskimo of Labrador are easily accessible. In Ontario, the Huron-Iroquois are being transformed 
into an industrious, civilized people. In the Maritime Provinces, the Micmacs and Milicents are in 
process of like transformation; and on many Canadian reserves, the representatives of Algonquin 
and other tribes are now settled, and gradually learning to conform to the usages of their supplanters, 
But in such a process, language and much else which is invaluable to the ethnologist, must disappear ; 
and still more is this the case in the great wilderness of the Northwest. There, in very recent years, 
the buffalo roamed in vast herds, furnishing an unfailing supply, not only of food, but of furs and 
skins, from which the tents, robes, and couches of Crees and Blackfeet were fashioned, and on which 
the Hudson Bay factors largely depended for like supplies. The Indian tribes lived around the Hud- 
son Bay forts much after the fashion of their fathers, bartering the produce of the chase for other 
needful supplies. But now all this is at an end. A revolution of the most radical character has super- 
vened. The inevitable disappearance of the wild hunter tribes of the Northwest, at no distant date, 
can no longer be questioned. Some memorial of the native races will, doubtless, survive in civilized 
tribes settling down to cultivate the soil over which their fathers roamed as nomad hunters. But 
such a process cannot fail to involve the extinction of the native languages from which alone the 
ethnical affinities and the history of the race are to be recovered. 
Nor must we overlook the significance of the fact that the Province of Manitoba began its 
independent career with a population of some ten thousand half-breeds. In that old historic past, 
when the gifted Roman annalist followed on the steps of imperial conquest in the British Islands, 
the dark type of the Silurian Britons was noted by Tacitus, and assigned by him to an Iberian 
source. In the latest classification of anthropologists, the modern representatives of this persistent 
type are designated “ Melanochroi,” the assumed representatives of the metis of Europe's prehistoric 
dawn, when the first wave of Aryan immigration came in contact with their Turanian or Allophylian 
precursors. Here, in our own Dominion, the same great Aryan wave, which reached the shores of 
the New World before the close of the fifteenth century, and, with ever added volume, has driven 
before it the native tribes, moves westward with irresistible aggression; and on our Northwest 
frontier, the same results are everywhere apparent. The ethnological history of Europe repeats 
itself here; and this phenomenon of the rise of a race of mixed blood settling down among the 
intruding colonists is replete with interest to the student of ethnology. 
I bring this subject under your special notice now, because it is one that demands immediate 
attention, one indeed that will not brook delay. The Indian may survive for a time. The inter- 
blended elements due to the contact of native and intruded races, I doubt not, will remain as a 
permanent factor in our future population. But the aboriginal arts must vanish; the native tradi- 
tions, in which so much history lies embodied, will scarcely survive to another generation; and as 
for their languages, if not recovered from the lips of the living generation, they will ere long be as 
utterly beyond recall as the snows of the past winter. Yet it is to comparative philology that we 
have to look for the solution of problems of highest interest and value to ourselves. If we are ever 
to recover any reliable clue to the ancient history of this continent, and the source and affiinities of 
the nations to whose inheritance we have succeeded, this can only be done by means of comparative 
philology; and for this, the materials must be gathered ere it be too late. “The Comparative 
Vocabularies of the Indian tribes of British Columbia,” the work of one of our own members, in 
conjunction with Dr. Fraser Tolmie, which was published in connection with the Geological and 
Natural History Survey of Canada, in 1864, is a timely and valuable contribution to the desired 
Proc, 1886, c, 
