126 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



character of the s])eech. We may well be grateful to an idiom which 

 has preserved the world-famous tori-ent of Niagai-a from the too 

 possible designation of " Tompkins' Falls." The wealth of forms and 

 the power of expression in the language have impressed every student. 

 Two huudred and fifty years ago, the scholarly Jesuit, Brebeuf, com. 

 pared it to the Greek, and found it in some respects superior. In our own 

 day, this opinion lias been reinforced by an authority of the greatest 

 weight. Professor Max Miiller, who learned the language from a 

 Mohawk undergraduate at Oxford, — now an esteemed physician in 

 Canada, — has written of it in terms of singular force. To his mind, 

 he declai'es, the structure of the language " is cpiite sufficient evidence 

 that tliose who worked out such a work of ai't were powei'ful reasonei's 

 and accurate classifiers." Powerful reasoners and accurate classifiers ! 

 To a]jpreciate the full strength of these expressions, we must consider 

 whether they could be properly applied to the framei\s of the great 

 classical tongues of the old world, the Ai'yan and the Semitic ; and 

 we must honestly decide that they could not. The irrational and 

 confused gender system of the Aryan, and the imperfect tense system 

 of the Semitic stock, must exclude them from the comparison. It is 

 a noteworthy fact that the two foremost philologists of Europe and 

 America, both devoted students and admirers of the Aryan s])eech, 

 have compai'ed this speech in its highest development with the lead- 

 ing American tongues, and that both, though diflfering widely in 

 their lia,'uistic theories on other points, have pionounced in the 

 strongest terms their opinion of the structural superiority of these 

 American languages. 



It will perhaps be asked why, if the American language and their 

 framers were of this superior chai'acter, the results achieved by the 

 latter have been so small. How did it happen that the Algonkins, 

 the Iroquois, and the Sahaptins remained barbaiians of the Stone 

 Age, while the Aryan nations attained the highest ])itch of civiliza- 

 tion. The question is a fair and ])ertinent one. The answer is found 

 in a single word, — opportunity. We lecognize the prime importance 

 of occasion and suiTOundings to an individual, but are apt to forget 

 that they are equally essential to a race. We admit that Milton, 

 condemned by fate to ignoi-ance and jienury, would probably have 

 remained "mute and inglorious." If the American civil war had not 



