32 JOHN EEADE ON 



Dr. Dawson, who, as we have seen, was astonished on discovering the likeness between 

 the Haida myth and that of the Tinné stock of northern British Columbia, thinks the 

 Haidas may have adopted the story from the Tshimsians. Father Petitot gives the racial 

 and linguistic affinities of the Dené-Dindjie a far-reaching extension. Those who call 

 themselves by that name inhabit a region bounded on the north and east by the Innuit, 

 on the west, by the Flatheads, on the south, by the Sioux and Algonquins. But, scattered 

 tribes of Indians who, he thinks, are evidently related to them, are found far to the 

 south. The Nabajos, for instance, who call themselves Tinuai (which, like Tinné, Dené 

 and Dindjie, means simply " men ") speak a language which has many points of corres- 

 pondence with that of the far-spreading northern race. The good missionary, who is not 

 alone in holding this view, seeks the connecting link between the Athabascan and Apache 

 families in the Sarcee tribe of the Upper Saskatchewan, which has been adopted by the 

 Blackfeet nation. Among themselves, the Sarcees speak a Dené dialect, which, while 

 visiting Fort Pitt in 18*73, he was able to understand by using a speech in part Chippe- 

 wyan, in part Peau-de-Lièvre.' 



It is, however, in the myths and folklore of the American Indians, and the ceremonies 

 based thereon, that the most striking resemblances occur between widely separated tribes. 

 But the utmost caution should be exercised in drawing inferences from such analogies. 

 On this point, Dr. Briuton remarks : "My guiding principle has been that when the same, 

 and that a very extraordinary story, is told by several tribes wholly apart in language and 

 location, then the probabilities are enormous that it is not a legend but a myth, and must 

 be exi)lained as such. It is a spontaneous product of the mind, not a reminiscence of an 

 historic event." 



The flood or deluge myth, of which the story of "The Drying of the "World," which 

 Mr. Gushing designates the " Zuni Iliad," is a fair example, is common, in some form, to 

 many tribes of Southern, Central and Northern Indians. 



The Rev. F. A. Paley, in the Preface to his edition of Hesiod, calls attention to the 

 wonderful coincidence, in some poinis, between the Hesiodic and the Mosaic cosmogony, 

 but M. Alfred Maury maintains that the American traditions of the Deluge come nearer to 

 those of the Jews and Chaldeans than those of any people in the Old "World. The cause 

 of those similarities he does not, however, pretend to explain. Equally noteworthy but, 

 doubtless, more explicable, is the close likeness between the Norse cycle of folklore and 

 that of the Eastern Algonquins which Mr. Leland has discovered in his " Algonquin 

 Legends." In the Introduction to that most interesting work, he says that " there is 

 hardly a song in the Norse collection which does not contain an incident found in the 

 Indian poem-legends, while in several there are many such coincidences." Mr. Leland 

 thinks it not impossible that the Eskimo and Indians may have listened to the Northmen. 



The iield of aboriginal research abounds in such possibilities, and Mr. Leland's hypo- 

 thesis is certainly not the least hopeful of the theories which resemblances, real or fancied, 

 between the folklores of the two hemispheres have suggested. The great difficulty is to 

 distinguish clearly and decisively between what is native to America, and what is of 

 foreign introduction. As in their weapons, their utensils, their domestic animals, their 

 food and their clothing, the aborigines have all, to some extent, followed European usage, 



' Congrès des Américanistes, Compte-Rendu, 1875, ii. 22. 



