AS A TEST OF MENTAL CAPACITY. 81 



simple. Bui the patient toil and protracted mental exertion required to penetrate into 

 the mysteries of a strange language (often without the aid of an interpreter), and to 

 acqi^ire a knowledge profound enough to afford the means of determining the intellectual 

 endowments of the people who speak it, are such as very few men of science have been 

 willing to undergo. Only in rare cases has a Lepsius among the Nubians, or a Washington 

 Matthews among the Hidatsas and Navajos, been found equal to the task. Many have 

 gathered vocabularies, which have been useful in determining the affiliations of races, but 

 which unfortunately at the same time, through their necessary imperfections, have given 

 rise to gross errors, — such as the current opinions that the languages spoken by barbarous 

 peoples are poor in expression, have few general or abstract terms, have no substantive 

 verbs, and no real inflections. For the proofs which enable us to dispel these errors, and 

 to disclose the true character of those languages and the capacity of the people who speak 

 them, w^e are indebted mainly to the enlightened and indefatigable efforts of missionary 

 zeal. 



One of the most remarkable prodiicts of this zeal is the huge folio volume of the Kev. 

 Father E. Petitot, on the language of the " Dèuè-Dindjié " Indians, published in 1S*16 by 

 the distinguished explorer, M. Alphonse L. Pinart, in his valuable " Bibliothèque de 

 Linguistique et d'Ethnographie Américaines," and representing the results of twenty 

 years of labour in one of the most uninviting regions of the earth. The " Dènè-Dindjié " 

 are the Indians known to American ethnologists as Athabascans (a name given to them 

 by Gallatin in his w^ell-known "Synopsis of the Indian Tribes"), — and later and more 

 generally as the Tinneh people. Tinnè, dènè, dindjié are three of the numerous dialectical 

 forms (including also tènè, dam, dune, Imna, adnna, thinneh, etc.) which the word for 

 " man " assumes in the numerous septs of this great family, occupying the whole of that 

 North American Siberia w^hich spreads (south of the Eskimo) from Hudson Bay on the 

 east to Alaska on the west, including also the northern interior of British Columbia and 

 part of its sea-coast. It is a dreary region of rocks and marshes, of shallow lakes and 

 treacherous rivers, offering no attractions except such as the hunter finds in the numerous 

 fur-bearing animals which roam over it and afford to the native tribes a precarious sub- 

 sistence. When this resource fails, they live on lichens, w^hich they gather from the rocks. 

 Their dwellings are tents of skins, or rude huts made of the boughs of the stunted trees 

 which here and there grow in the scanty soil. The people live in small scattered bands, 

 with little of what can be called a social organization. M. Petitot depicts them with a 

 strictly impartial pencil. 



In bodily aspect, he tells us, they differ from the Eskimo, and resemble more nearly 

 their southern neighbors, particularly the Sioux. They are tall and slender, with high 

 but receding foreheads, wide cheek-bones, and prominent brows, beneath which the large 

 eyes gleam with an ophidian lustre. The heavy upper eyelid, a little oblique, lends often to 

 the glance something peculiarly suspicious and distrustful. The straight shining black 

 hair descends in heavy locks over the eyes and shoulders The colour varies, but though 

 clear, is never so white as that of Europeans, having always a tinge of brown. 



In character the Tinneh people unite, in our author's opinion, the usual defects of 

 savages with more good qualities than are ordinarily combined with tlicse defects. Their 

 hard life makes them selfish, proud, severe towards women and old and weak people — 

 though blindly indulgent to their children — and also cowardly, lazy axid deceitfiil. But, 



Sec. II, [1891. 11. 



