ijOAS] HAiSTDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAiST LANGUAGES 71 



unconscious, and that for this reason the processes which lead to 

 their formation can be followed without the misleading and dis- 

 turbing factors of secondary explanations, which are so common in 

 ethnology, so much so that they generally obscure the real history 

 of the development of ideas entirely. 



Cases are rare in which a people have begun to speculate about 

 linguistic categories, and these speculations are almost always so 

 clearly affected by the faulty reasoning that has led to secondary 

 explanations, that they are readily recognized as such, and can not 

 disturb the clear view of the history of linguistic processes. In 

 America we find this tendency, for instance, among the Pawnee, who 

 seem to have been led to several of their religious opinions by lin- 

 guistic similarities. Incidentally such cases occur also in other 

 languages, as, for instance, in Chinook mythology, where the Culture 

 Hero discovers a man in a canoe who obtains fish by dancing, and 

 tells him that he must not do so, but must catch fish with the net, 

 a tale which is entirely based on the identity of the two words for 

 dancing, and catching with a net. These are cases which show that 

 Max Miiller's theory of the influence of etymology upon religious 

 concepts explains some of the religious phenomena, although, of 

 course, it can be held to account for only a very small portion. 



Judging the importance of linguistic studies from this point of 

 view, it seems well worth while to subject the whole range of lin- 

 guistic concepts to a searching analysis, and to seek in the peculiari- 

 ties of the grouping of ideas in different languages an important 

 characteristic in the history of the mental development of the various 

 branches of mankind. From this point of view, the occurrence of 

 the most fundamental grammatical concepts in all languages must 

 be considered as proof of the unity of fundamental psychological 

 processes. The characteristic groupings of concepts in Ameri- 

 can languages will be treated more fully in the discussion of the 

 single linguistic stocks. The ethnological significance of these 

 studies lies in the clear definition of the groupings of ideas which are 

 brought out by the objective study of language. 



There is still another theoretical aspect that deserves special 

 attention. When we try to think at all clearly, we think, on the 

 whole, in words; and it is well known that, even in the advance- 

 ment of science, inaccuracy of vocabulary has often been a stumbling- 



