JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 55 



philosophy; and an Indian language cannot be profitably studied 

 unless the other activities of the tribe either are understood or are 

 simultaneously studied. And so Powell's Introduction includes 

 under its modest title a succinct compend of the generalisations of 

 North American ethnology. 



The second work under this head is an essay on the "Evolu- 

 tion of Language " (First Annual Report Bureau of Ethnology, 1881). 

 Linguistic progress includes very little addition of new material, 

 but consists chiefly of internal change. The processes of change 

 are classed as Combination, or the union of two or more words for 

 a new purpose, Vocal Mutation, Intonation, and Placement or the 

 association of sense relations with the relative positions of words in 

 a sentence. It is shown that the primitive languages differ from 

 the advanced in their imperfect discrimination of parts of speech, 

 in their elaborate inflection, and in their lack of general terms. Pro- 

 gress is through the differentiation of the parts of speech and the 

 substitution of general terms and separable qualifiers for inflected 

 words. "Judged by these criteria, the English stands alone in the 

 highest rank ; but as a written language, in the way in which its 

 alphabet is used, the English has but just emerged from a barbaric 

 condition." 



The remaining work is an essay on "Philology," which is con- 

 sidered as "the science of activities designed for expression" 

 {American Anthropologist, 1900). The activities are classified as 

 emotional, oral, gestural, written, and logistic languages, logistic 

 language including notations, like the algebraic and musical, in 

 which ideas are expressed directly by signs, without the necessary 

 implication of words. The science of oral language is developed 

 at some length. 



Four addresses and essays were devoted to philosophies, or 

 the systems of explanation of the phenomena of nature: the "Phi- 

 losophy of the North American Indians" was read to the American 

 Geographical Society in 1876, and "Mythologic Philosophy" to a 

 section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 

 in 1879. The "Lessons of Folklore" and "Sophiology or the Sci- 

 ence of Activities Designed to give Instruction " appeared in the 

 American Anthropologist in 1900 and 1901. The first is chiefly de- 

 scriptive. The second compares mythic explanations with scien- 

 tific, discusses the successive stages of mythologic philosophy, and 

 indicates the dependence on it of ancientism, spiritism, thauma- 

 turgics, and religion. The third deals with the evolution of phi- 

 losophies, by pointing out various survivals of primitive explana- 



