12 BUREAU OF AMEEICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 43 



iard in civil life could have remained among them without having 

 been noticed, owing to the national jealousies everywhere prevalent 

 at the time.'* Turning to the grammar itself this critic finds that the 

 pronunciation of Taensa sounds is explained by means of the French, 

 English, German, and Spanish. Now, inasmuch as neither M. Hau- 

 monte, among whose papers the manuscript was supposed to have 

 been found, nor M. Parisot could have heard the language spoken, 

 it is conceived that the original compiler must have had a knowledge 

 of languages quite remarkable for the early part of the eighteenth 

 century. He also finds references to the Nahuatl, Kechua, and Al- 

 gonkin tongues, which must certainly have been introduced by the 

 translator, although no explanation of this is vouchsafed. Regard- 

 ing the structure of the language itself Doctor Brinton says : 



That an American language should have a distinctively grammatical gender; 

 that it should have a true relative pronoun ; that its numeral system should 

 be based on the nine units in the extraordinarily simple manner here pro- 

 posed ; that it should have three forms of the plural ; that its verbs should 

 present the singular simplicity of these — these traits are, indeed, not impos- 

 sible, but they are too unusual not to demand the best of evidence.* 



The most convincing proof " as to the humbuggery of this whole 

 business " he finds, however, in the Taensa songs. According to these, 

 the sugar maple is made to flourish in the Louisiana swamps; the 

 sugar cane was raised by the Taensa, " although the books say it was 

 introduced into Louisiana by the Jesuits in 1761 ; " potatoes, rice, 

 apples, and bananas were familiar to them, " and the white birch 

 and wild rice are described as flourishing around the bayous of the 

 lower Mississippi." To the argument that these might be mistrans- 

 lations of misunderstood native words he asks what sort of editing 

 it is " which could not only commit such unpardonable blunders, but 

 send them forth to the scientific world without a hint that they do not 

 pretend to be anything more than guesses?" The same ignorance 

 of climatic conditions appears in the Calendar of the Taensa, particu- 

 larly in the references to snow and ice here and in other places. The 

 style of the songs themselves is also " utterly unlike that reported 

 from any other native tribe. It much more closely resembles the 

 stilted and tumid imitations of supposed savage simplicity common 

 enough among French writers of the eighteenth century.'' *" As an 

 example of this ini-Tndian style and the geographical ignorance 

 accompanying it Brinton quotes one of these songs, " The Song of 

 the Marriage," and connnents u\)on it as follows: 



The Choctaws are located ten <lnys' journey up the Mississippi, in the wild- 

 rice region about the headwaters of the stream, whereas they were the imme- 

 diate neighbors of the real Taensa and dwelt when first discovered in the 

 middle and southern parts of the present State of Mississippi. The sugar 



o Amer. Antiq., \ii, 109-110. " Ibid., 110. <• Thkl, 111. 



