NATIONAL ACADEMY BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS VOL. VIII 



Athabascan stocks and the small-scale patchwork of the stocks 

 in the Coast ranges of California. While neither Powell nor 

 his associates regarded the map as final, it was accepted as a 

 sufficient base for several important inferences, among them 

 that the aboriginal tribes had long been sedentary and not no- 

 madic, as some ethnologists have supposed, for if nomadic the 

 linguistic areas should show more overlapping and interming- 

 ling than is actually the case. It is only in view of this con- 

 clusion that the small areas of the California stocks can be 

 understood, and even then it cannot be understood easily ; for 

 however sedentary the tribes of northern California have been, 

 it is difficult indeed to believe that they represent complete 

 linguistic independence in closely contiguous areas of moder- 

 ate relief, without resemblances by inheritance or by short-dis- 

 tance intermixture. Recent studies indeed suggest that a way 

 out of this quandary may be found by grouping together cer- 

 tain stocks which Powell regarded as wholly independent ; but 

 'whatever changes may be made in the original map, it was a 

 great contribution to the science of American linguistics. / 



PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES. 



Powell's interest in philosophical studies was early devel- 

 oped and long continued; as one of his friends said: "He 

 drank deep at the perennial fount of classic philosophy . . . 

 and had constant reference to the courses followed by the 

 pioneers of definite thought about the east shore of the Medi- 

 terranean." It is therefore interesting to quote his three defi- 

 nitions of this elusive subject written in the early '8o's. "Phil- 

 " osophy is the explanation of the phenomena of the universe" 

 (Philosophical Bearings of Darwinism, Washington, 1882) ; 

 "Philosophy is the science of opinion" (Three Methods of 

 Evolution, Bull. Phil. Soc. Wash., vi, 1883, p. xxx) ; and "A 

 philosophy is a system of opinions concerning the phenomena 

 of the universe, which the people entertaining such opinions 

 have observed" (Human Evolution, Trans. Anthrop. Soc. 

 Wash., ii, 1883, p. 181). How significant it is that the em- 

 phasis is shifted from the objective phenomena of the universe 

 in the first definition to the subjective science of opinion in the 

 second, and that the single science of opinion suggested in the 



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