AS ATTEST OP MENTAL CAPACITY. 85 



while " he thinks him good " would be mzun ye yenildhen, lit. " good him he deems." So 

 danntsar, we weep ; dd-ne-nuVlsar, we cause thee to weep, where da is we, we is thee, and the 

 inserted I (which is aspirated for emphasis) puts the verb in the causative form. 



This brief summary, or rather this series of extracts, gives only an imperfect idea of 

 the wealth of this language, not only in forms of expre.ssion, but in the ideas which it 

 expresses. If it be thought that this wealth is far beyond anything that the circumstances 

 of the people can require, there are two considérai ions which should be borne in mind. 

 In the first place we must remember that the life of savages, like that of civilized men, is 

 full of exigencies demanding the exertion of many mental faculties, and calling for an 

 endless variety of communications between the members of a household or of a tribe. 

 Secondly, there is in every healthy human mind, as in every healthy human body, evidence 

 of an immense reserved force, ready for development to an almost unlimited extent. The 

 recruiting serjeant sees, in the movements of an awkward but strongly framed rustic, 

 evidence of the thews and sinews which will in time make the lithe and prompt artillery- 

 man ; and the philologist perceives in the speech of the savage the promise of capacity for 

 any duties of civilization. 



In the case of the Tinneh we are fortunately not limited to inference and prediction. 

 The capabilities of the race have been strikingly shown. The " Tinneh (or Athabascan) 

 family " is a widespread one, diffused over a larger portion of North America than any 

 other linguistic stock, except perhaps the Algonkin. As in the other hemisphere, so in 

 this, the tribes of the bleak and barren north have sent out their swarms toward the sunny 

 and fertile south. Ethnologists have traced their line of march by the fragmentary septs 

 which have remained along the track, from the Mackenzie basin and Alaska, through the 

 regions which are now the Province of British Columbia and the States of Washington and 

 Oregon — where the Sikanis, the Takullis, the Kwalhiokwas, the Umkwas, the Totutu- 

 nies and other remnants still linger, —to the fruitful river-valleys of Northern California. 

 Here for a time the emigrants halted, and their natural capacities and character found room 

 for development. Mr. Stephen Powers, in his excellent description of the Californian Indians, 

 which composes the third volume of the Smithsonian " Contributions to North American 

 Ethnology," gives a brief accorrnt of the Hupâ, or Hoopas,who occupy Hoopa Valley on the 

 Lower Trinity, north of San Francisco. Their most notable characteristic is their master- 

 ful force of character. In a vigorous passage, which I slightly condense, he tells us : " Next 

 after the Karoks they are the finest race in all that region, and they even excel them 

 in their statecraft, and in the singular influence, or perhaps brute force, which they exer- 

 cise over the vicinal tribes. They are the Romans of Northern California in their valour 

 and in their wide-reaching dominions They are the French in the extended diffusion of 

 their language. They hold in a state of semi-vassalage most of the tribes around them, 

 exacting from them annual tribute in the shape of shell-money ; and they compel all their 

 tributaries to speak Hupâ in communication with them. Although most of these petty 

 tributaries had their own tongues originally, so rigorously were they put to school in 

 the language of their masters that most of their vocabularies were sapped and reduced to 

 bald categories of names. They had the dry bones of substantives, but the flesh and blood 

 of verbs were sucked out of them by the Hupâ. A Mr. White, a pioneoT well acquainted 

 with the Chimalakwe, who once had an entirely distinct tongue, told me that before they 

 became extinct they scarcely employed a verb which was not Hupâ. I tried in vain to 



