SWANTON] INDIAN TRIBES OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 15 



III answer Hriiiton states thai he has " nothing to say about M. 

 Gatschet's advocacy of the Taensa langiia2^e. If,*" he adds, "• he de- 

 sires to employ his time in holsteiin<>- up the manufacturers of that 

 bold forgery, posterity will reward him with a pitying smile."" In 

 the later work before referred to he gives a sketch of the controversy 

 but adds no new arguments. 



In this discussion the opponents of the Taensa Grammar, namely, 

 Messrs. Brinton and A^inson, had made the following points: They 

 had shown that the claimed original manuscript was not in the hands 

 of the person by whom the linguistic material had been furnished 

 nor among the documents of his family, that it could not have been 

 entirely in Spanish as at first claimed, and that the grammar could 

 not have been compiled by M. Haumonte, to whom it had been 

 ascribed. M. Parisot was also shown to have been inconsistent in 

 the statements he gave out from time to time. Thus, though he does 

 not claim to have made more than one discovery of Taensa manu- 

 scripts, in 1880 he possessed " only some principles of grammar, a 

 fairly long list of words, two songs or stories, and the translation of 

 the Patet\ the Ai^e^ and the CredOy'' all of which occupied 11 pages 

 in the Revue cle Lingiiistique, while in 1882 his material covered 

 42 larger pages and the two songs had swelled to 11. In 1880 

 he expressed himself as unable to complete an account of the gram- 

 mar of the language for lack of material, but in 1882 he did 

 that very thing. In 1880 he was unable to find an}^ numbers above 

 8 except 10 and 60, while in 1882 9, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 30, 40, 50, TO, 

 80, 90, 100, 101, 110, 119, 200, 300. 1.000, 1,002, 1,881, 2,000, and 

 10,000 had made their appearance. During the same period the 

 language had developed two dialects, five new alphabetic signs, and a 

 dual not even hinted at in the beginning. 



As suggested by Adam, the texts might have been put together by 

 some priest or student for his own pleasure, strange as the under- 

 taking would appear to be, but the rejection of this material as 

 aboriginal tends to throw discredit on the rest, for if we admit that 

 it had passed through the hands of some one willing to make such 

 original use of it, why might not his creative faculty have been 

 devoted to the manufacture of the whole? Gatschet's attempt to 

 defend the climatic and other inconsistencies which these texts con- 

 tain Avill hardly appeal to aiiA^one who has examined them as a wise 

 or well executed move. Admitting that the texts were collected in 

 1827 or 1828 as claimed for the seven published at Epinal, it is of 

 course probable that the Taensa were acquainted with the foreign 

 fruits and A-egetables there referred to. but it is questionable whether 

 they would have introduced them prominently into their songs, and 



" Revue dc Linijidsliquc, xxi, .j41. 



