ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT LXXXIII 
Seminary of Virginia, and the junior class in 1869. Two 
years later he was ordained a deacon of the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church, and in May began mission work among the 
Ponka Indians of Dakota Territory. But the rigorous elimate 
and the vicissitudes of early frontier life soon affected his 
health, which was never robust, and after serious attacks of 
illness in July, 1872, and early in 1873, he was compelled to 
abandon his mission work in August of the latter year, soon 
after he had acquired the ability to converse with the Indians 
without the aid of an interpreter. Returning to Maryland, he 
was engaged in parish work until July, 1878. 
While pursuing his work as missionary among the Indians, 
Mr Dorsey became a correspondent of the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution. His profound knowledge of the dialects of the Siouan 
languages early attracted the attention of Major J. W. Powell, 
at whose instance he was sent among the Omaha tribe in 1878 
for the purpose of acquiring additional linguistic and other 
anthropologic material, remaining among that people until the 
spring of 1880. In the meantime, on the organization of 
the Bureau of Ethnology, in 1879, he was immediately chosen 
one of the scientific corps and was arduously engaged in lin- 
guistic and sociologic work up to the time of the illness which 
terminated in his death at Washington on February 4, 1895. 
His great modesty and his strong conviction that the views 
of a student should be molded by truths prevented him from 
formulating subjective theories by which to judge the value of 
his facts. In the later years of his studies in linguistic mor- 
phology he began to feel the inadequacy of the venerable 
agelutimation theory to explain all the facts of word structure 
prevailing in the languages he was studying, and he came to 
look upon adaptation—the infusing with a new meaning or 
function an element which before had or had not any definite 
signification—as an important and potent factor in the genesis 
and development of morphologic structures. His mastery of 
the wealth of forms in the languages he studied enabled him 
to illustrate copiously the working of this principle. His lin- 
guistic acumen and painstaking accuracy are brought out in 
his interlinear translations of numerous and voluminous texts, 
