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1898-99. | LANGUAGE AND RELIGION. 275 
together and the transition to the worship of one god was easy. When 
we study the American Indian languages we find that the different 
stocks give different religious beliefs. The principal divinity among the 
Algonkin tribes is known under various names, as Glooscap among the 
Penobscots and Micmacs, Nanabush and Manabosho among the Dela- 
wares and Ojibwas, and WNapzo among the Blackfeet. The idea 
of a Supreme Being among these tribes is somewhat indefinite, 
whereby the term theistic as applied to them must be qualified 
as already mentioned. The definite deity is a mythical person- 
age, good and bad. The grave Huron-Iroquois people have a 
different principal divinity, known as Taronhiawagon, the Holder 
of the Heavens, or Rawenzyo, our Great Master, “a deity nobler in char- 
acter and attributes than any of the Aryan divinities.’ Horatio Hale 
has shown by a study of the Siouan languages that the intensely re- 
ligious Dakotas have a remarkable set of deities, the Oonktayhe or gods 
of vital energy, the Zakooshkanshkan or moving god, who is “too subtle 
to be perceived by the senses,” who “is everywhere present,’ who 
“exerts a controlling influence over instinct, intellect and passion,” and 
the Hayoka or anti-natural god, with whom all things work by the rule 
of contrary, to whom joy seems grief, and misery brings joy, who shivers 
in summer and swelters in winter, to whom good is evil and evil good. 
The medicine men who are the physicians and priests of the native 
tribes of Canada, the healers of diseases and spiritual advisers and inter- 
cessors, have a sacred dialect of speech, epithets raised from material 
meaning to a spiritual significance, words expressing religious ideas. and 
a style of phraseology peculiar to themselves. In the sacred dialect 
there is revealed a worship of God in nature, symbolical expressions and 
names of deities hidden behind the veil of nature. Beside their worship 
of the Great Sun, there exists an earth-worship, the Earth being called 
Our Mother. As the Chinese say that heaven and earth are the father 
and mother of all things, and the Greek Demeter (Ceres), which is of 
distinctly Aryan origin, being none other than Géméter, mother-carth, so 
the Blackfeet associating the idea of masculine godhead with the sun, 
place the fruitful, all-nourishing earth, as a goddess. The Sun is 
addressed as Kznon our father, and the Earth as Kzksistonon, our 
mother. ? 
The faculty of speech is a mysterious thing belonging to man as a 
supernatural being. We may assume that primitive man began his 
earthly career with vocal organs and the power of expression. A theory 
has been propounded that men or rather the precursors of men were at 
first incapable of speech, and that they acquired this capacity at different 
