JOHN WESLEY POWELL DAVIS 



nection with that which he wishes to express" (16). Thus 

 judged, "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 emerged from a barbaric condition" (16). 

 He later returns to the same topic : "Men with linguistic super- 

 stitions mourn the degeneracy of English, German, and 

 French without being aware of the great improvement which 

 has been made in them as instruments for the expression of 

 thought" (20th Ann. Kept., 1898-1899, 1903, p. CLII). After 

 reading these extracts it is hardly necessary to add that Powell 

 was an advocate of the introduction of simplified spelling, for 

 the distinction between its advocates and its opponents is al- 

 most wholly a matter of temperament, not of learning. 



The First Annual Report of the Bureau also contains one 

 of Powell's earliest philosophical essays, entitled "Sketch of 

 the mythology of the North American Indians," which he had 

 read as a vice-presidential address before a section of the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1879, 

 under the title of "Mythologic Philosophy." Its headings are : 

 "The genesis of philosopy," "Two grand stages of philoso- 

 phy," "Mythologic philosophy has four stages," and so on. 

 From the second heading the following" characteristic aphorism 

 may be quoted : "The unknown known is the philosophy of 

 savagery; the known unknown is the philosophy of civiliza- 

 tion." And then comes an exclamatory apostrophe, as if in 

 scorn of our self-sufficiency: "Ye men of science, ye wise 

 fools, ye have discovered the law of gravity, but ye cannot tell 

 what gravity is. But savagery has has a cause and a method 

 for all things; nothing is left unexplained" (pp. 21, 22, 29). 



SAVAGERY, BARBARISM, AND CIVILIZATION. 



Powell's capacity to frame concise summaries of elaborate 

 studies is well illustrated in a "brief characterization of sav- 

 agery, barbarism, and civilization," in which he summarizes 

 the chief points of his addresses on "From Savagery to Bar- 

 barism" and "From Barbarism to Civilization," and out of 

 which the following extracts are taken, with some rearrange- 

 ment : "The age of savagery is the age of stone; the age of 

 barbarism is the age of clay ; the age of civilization is the age 



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