26 JOHN EBADE ON THE LTTBRAEY FACULTY 



afterwards, coutributed to the making of the Celts aud thus to European civilization, 

 should be of the same stock with the red man found on this continent ages after by the 

 modified descendants of those ancient half-breeds. It is, at least, not ïinworthy of remark 

 that the Basque was an habitual visitor to these shores long, we cannot say how long, 

 before Jacques Cartier set foot on them. Some have even found in the language of the 

 maritime tribes traces of more than a mere trading intercourse between the Christian 

 Basque fishermen and the pagan Indians. However we may try to account for the orato- 

 rical genius of some of the Indians, there is ample proof of its existence. Nor is it in 

 connection with that point alone that we might justly ask to include our aborigines 

 among Dr. Boyd's " people of whom more could have been made." There seems to be 

 little doubt, indeed, that the Indians, accosted by Europeans at aud immediately after the 

 time of Columbus, were generally of a kindlier, more humane, and more tractable character 

 than their descendants have come to be after some generations of experience of their unin- 

 vited guests. "We may well ask ourselves what they might have become, had the explorers 

 and colonists been inspired by purer motives and more generous sentiments. If we find 

 them, and if some writers delight to qualify them, as treacherous, blood-thirsty, as well as 

 ignorant and superstitions, it ought not to be forgotten that the example set them and 

 the treatment which they received, were not always such as to improve their minds or 

 morals or to win them over to the usages of civilization. Civilization to them was, 

 in many instances, presented in the most odious form of selfishness, rapacity, and all 

 injustice. 



What they have been capable of growing to under the favourable auspices of upright 

 dealing and wise training, the records of civilized and partially civilized Indians testify. 

 Of their skill in warfare I need not speak. Some of their chiefs, had they served in the 

 armies of civilized nations, would have had their place on the rolls of fame as great 

 generals or conqiierors. With more pleasure I recall their achievements in the arts of 

 peace. They have furnished inventors, artists, physicians, lawyers, preachers. As to 

 their literary faculty we find its germ in the legend of the tribe, the story-telling of the 

 wigwam, and the speech-making of the council. "Multitudes of poetical tales and legends," 

 writes Sir. W. Dawson, in " Fossil Men," " have been written down from the lips of old 

 Indian men and women," and he mentions as a sx^ecimen an unpublished myth, collected by 

 Mr. Hand among the Micmacs entitled " Rushing Wind and Rolling Wave." This charac- 

 teristic has been iitilized by the greatest poet and the greatest novelist of America in their 

 most truly American productions. When they wrote the works in question, the scientific 

 study of the American races had hardly well begun. The organization of the Bureau of 

 Ethnology at Washington and of the "Congrès des Américanistes " in Europe is pleasing 

 evidence of the enlightened aud fruitful interest taken in the subject in recent years. Some 

 investigators haA^e endured hardships and faced perils which can only be paralleled in the 

 annals of missionary self-devotion. It would be strange if all this laboiir did not yield 

 some important facts, if some fresh light were not shed on the origin, habits, traditions, 

 aud modes of thought and speech of the Indian nations. Even Indians themselves have 

 engaged in the same research. Peter Dooyentate Clark wrote a book on the " Origin and 

 Traditional History of the Wyandots," which was published in Toronto in 18*70. A later 

 contribution by an Indian to Indian history is the " History of the Six Nations " by chief 

 Elias Johnson, of the Tuscaroras. An earlier work on the same confederacy was written 



