The Smithsonian Institution 



would prove of the highest interest to the philosophical 

 inquirer, should have been hitherto almost entirely over- 

 looked." 1 



So far as native speech is concerned, the methods and pur- 

 poses thus set forth have been pursued, and the linguistic 

 material has been collected not only for linguistic purposes, 

 but as a means for the interpretation of the primitive mind ; 

 indeed the plan has been modified only by extending it to 

 sign-language, pictography, hieroglyphics, decoration, paint- 

 ing, and tattooing. 



The material in possession of the bureau representing the 

 speech of the American aborigines is vast. During the 

 seventeen years of its existence a considerable part of its 

 energies has been devoted to the collection of such material; 

 five quarto volumes of " Contributions " and two octavo 

 volumes of" Bulletins" relating exclusively to Indian vocabu- 

 laries, grammars, and texts have been published, besides nine 

 volumes of a "Bibliography of the Indian Languages," and 

 various special papers and chapters have been devoted to the 

 same subject; yet the greater part of the linguistic collections 

 remain unpublished, though in constant use. The catalogue 

 of linguistic manuscripts, some of which are extensive, reaches 

 1533 titles, including 332 transferred by the Smithsonian 

 Institution in 1876. The greater part of the material used 

 in classifying the fifty-nine stocks and over eight hundred 

 tribes above enumerated was collected by collaborators of 

 the bureau. No other linguistic collection of comparable 

 extent and variety is known to exist; and since the ma- 

 terial was recorded in large part by trained linguists, and 

 since all the languages and stocks represent a widely dis- 

 tributed people in the simpler stages of intellectual develop- 



1 " Smithsonian Report," 1852, Appendix, page 100. 



