30 JOHN EEADE ON THE LITER AEY FACULTY, ETC. 



New World was uot without its creative iuHuence ou the wild children of the forest and 

 the plain, as well as on the more civilized communities of the tropics. Can I better supple- 

 ment this hope than by a reference to a Caughnawaga poetess. Miss Emily Martin, a 

 manuscript volume of whose poems was shown at the Indian exhibition of September, 

 1883 ? Some of her poems display poetic feeling and mastery of language — the English 

 language. It will have been noted, indeed, that it is in another tongue than their own 

 that most of the literary Indians of America have written. Some of them have written 

 even in Latin, and there are instances of respectable Indian linguists. Although, as long- 

 as a large proportion of those who speak them are isolated from the rest of the population, 

 there is little fear of the native tongues growing into disuse, it is more than likely that, 

 as civilization advances, the number of persons speaking any Indian tongue will diminish. 

 In the Indian Territory of the United States, in the schools of the more cultivated nations, 

 the other branches of education are studied at the expense of the native languages. Miss 

 Jeuness, writing in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1879, mentions the case of a young 

 Cherokee lady, a teacher of languages, philosophy and mathematics, who confessed to 

 having understood only two words of a Cherokee sermon. Intermarriage, of course, tends 

 to produce a like result. Miss Jeuness sees therein the great solution of the Indian ques- 

 tion, as regards the civilized tribes, and it may prove the solution uot only of the Indian 

 but of many questions which now look difficult. It is possible, therefore, that some of 

 the existing languages may in time (some of them, perhaps, before very long) wholly dis- 

 appear, as others have already done. But to allow any of them thus to vanish, without 

 some effort to discover whatever tradition and comparative philology may be able to 

 reveal concerning them, would be a neglect only less blameworthy than the destruction 

 of the historical monuments of Central America and Mexico. 



It has, I think, been brought out by manifold evidence that some of these languages 

 are not unfit for literary uses, and that those who spoke them were not without a cons- 

 ciousness of their strength and beaiity and comprehensive force of expression. Such 

 gathered testimony, of which a small share has been presented in this paper, adds much to 

 their interest, and suggests new inducements for their critical study as important members 

 of the great family of hiiman speech. A good deal has been done in that way during the 

 last forty or fifty, and more especially during the last fifteen or twenty, years. Since Mr. 

 Stephens bade adieu to the ruins of those cities of Yucatan, which he had done so much 

 to bring to light, a new era has begun for American archaeology, and its philology has not 

 been forgotten. But notwithstanding all the conquests of recent years, there are still 

 many provinces of knowledge that Americanists haA'^e not yet securely won. New castas 

 of investigation, new paths of research which inquirers, judicious and persevering, may 

 follow out to fruitful conclusions, have been opened up, and from every such path 

 numerous by-paths branch off, which may offer prizes of ascertained truth to the trained 

 eye that looks for " good in everything." In the true sense, though nearly four centuries 

 have passed away since Columbus caught the first glad glimpse of the " dashing silver- 

 flashiug surges of St. Salvador," America remains yet to be discovered. For, until its 

 people and their languages have been traced home to their lost kindied in the far-olf 

 prehistoric past, the work so valiantly begun by that great explorer cannot be pronounced 

 completed. 



