June 21, 1883] 



NATURE 



175 



sumptuous volume, which comprises sundry contributions 

 by the director on the " Mythology of the North Ame- 

 rican Indians," on the " Evolution of Language/' on 

 "Wyandot Government," and on "Limitations to the 

 Use of some Anthropological Data"; a valuable and 

 profusely illustrated treatise on the " Mortuary Customs 

 of the North American Indians," by H. C. Yarrow ; a 

 preliminary attempt to decipher " Central American Pic- 

 ture Writing," by E. S. Holden ; a paper by C. C. Royce 

 on " Cessions of Land by Indian Tribes to the United 

 States ; " Col. Garrick Mallery's important treatise on 

 "Sign Language among North American Indians," which 

 has already appeared as a " Separat-Abdruck " ; a " Cata- 

 logue of Linguistic MSS. in the Library of the Bureau of 

 Ethnology," by J. C. Pilling ; lastly, " Illustrations of the 

 Method of Recording Indian Languages from the MSS. 

 of Major J. O. Dorsey, A. S. Gatschet, and S. R. Riggs." 

 Should the department continue to be administered on 

 these broad lines and in this enlightened spirit, a school 

 of anthropology must soon be developed in America, 

 with which, without liberal State subvention, our Euro- 

 pean societies will find it difficult to keep pace. But with 

 our petty rivalries, our heavy public burdens and con- 

 stantly increasing armaments, the prospect of such 

 State subvention seems at present at least somewhat 

 remote. 



The papers contributed by the director to this volume 

 touch Briefly on several important topics of a general 

 character, and often express views regarding the origin 

 and evolution of speech, mythologies, religious and tribal 

 institutions, which will scarcely go unchallenged in some 

 quarters. That these psychological phenomena have 

 hitherto been studied from a somewhat too subjective 

 standpoint, and that many metaphysical subtleties have 

 consequently been grafted on the theogonies and early 

 philosophies of savage man may readily be admitted. In a 

 paper on the mythology of the Indian Aryans recently read 

 before the English Folk-Lore Society, Mr. Andrew Lang 

 dwelt on the necessity of distinguishing between the old 

 and comparatively modern hymns in the Vedas. He 

 pointed out that the Vedas themselves do not embody 

 the most primitive theories on the origin of man and the 

 universe, that they contain ideas at once very old and 

 very new, very mythological and very philosophical, and 

 he adduced several instances of crude and childish savage 

 myths overlapping the more profou d and advanced con- 

 cepts of the Aryan Hindus. In the same way Major 

 Powell argues that philosophy passes in its upward evo- 

 lution through two stages — the mjthologic, in which all 

 outward phenomena are interpreted by analogy with sub- 

 jective experience, and the scientific, in which they are 

 treated as orderly successions of events. The mythologic 

 necessarily precedes the scientific stage, for " without 

 mythology there could be no science, as without childhood 

 there could be no ultimate forms." It follows that the 

 views of primitive men are simple, childish, and inco- 

 herent, and that it is illogical to credit his theogonies, as 

 is often done, with profound and abstruse concepts of the 

 universe. Here, as in all other evolutions, the progress 

 is from the simple and homogeneous to the complex and 

 heterogeneous ; the " unknown known " of savage philo- 

 sophy antedates the "knoivn unknown" of later science. 

 In the primitive stage all things are known, that is, sup- 

 posed to be known ; later on some few things are really 

 discovered, and these when properly understood throw 

 doubt on all the rest. The era of the known unknown is 

 thus reached; to crude and offhand explanations succeeds 

 the critical period of investigation and discovery ; science 

 is born ; civilisation begins. This upward growth is illus- 

 trated by many examples, such as that of the rainbow — 

 which for the Shoshoni (Snake Indian) is a beautiful 

 serpent abrading the icy firmament to give us snow and 

 rain ; which in the Norse myth is the bridge Bifrost 

 stretching from earth to heaven ; which in the Iliad 



becomes the Goddess Iris, Messenger of Olympus; in. 

 Genesis a witness to the Covenant ; in science an analysis 

 of white light into its constituent colours. 



North America, it is aptly remarked, presents a mag- 

 nificent field for the study of savage and barbaric philo- 

 sophies from this fresh standpoint. Formerly attention 

 was paid almost exclusively to the more advanced peoples, 

 Aryans, Semites, Hamites, Chinese. Now it is felt that 

 the complex mythologic, religious, linguistic systems of 

 these peoples are the outcome of earlier and simpler 

 phases of thought, consequently that the study of bar- 

 barous and savage communities can no longer be neg- 

 lected. But in North America alone we have our 

 seventy-five ethnical groups speaking seventy-five stock 

 languages and more than five hundred well-marked dia- 

 lects, each linguistic stock with a philosophy of its own, 

 or rather as many philosophic systems as it has distinct 

 languages and dialects. 



To account for this astounding diversity of speech, 

 Major Powell holds with one or two distinguished European 

 philologUts that the fundamental languages must have been 

 evolved in independent centres, that in fact "mankind was 

 widely scattered over the earth anterior to the develop- 

 ment of articulate speech, and that the languages of 

 which we are cognisant sprang from innumerable centres 

 as each little tribe developed its own language "(p. 28). 

 He fails to see that this view, in itself to the last degree 

 improbable, is wholly unnecessary and even inadequate 

 to explain the actual conditions. It is unnecessary because 

 the present diversity of speech may be sufficiently ac- 

 counted for by its vast antiquity and extremely evanescent 

 character. Time, acting in combination with the phonetic 

 growth and decay inherent in all speech, must inevitably 

 effect an indefinite amount of specific change, even sup- 

 posing that all languages started from a single centre. 

 No evolutionist can deny this, for he admits that time 

 combined with a tendency to modification in altered en- 

 vironments, has brought about an indefinite amount of 

 specific and generic change in the biological world. But 

 animals and vegetables are certainly more persistent, 

 ceteris paribus, than linguistic types. Ergo. The theory is 

 moreover inadequate to explain the actual conditions in 

 America alone. Here we have doubtless a vast number 

 of specifically distinct languages ; but the mechanism of 

 all is very much alike ; all are cast, as it were, in the 

 same mould ; all belong to the polysynthetic or at least 

 to the agglutinating order. But if speech had in America 

 been evolved in many different centres, it may be asked 

 how this striking uniformity is to be explained ? Why 

 have we not here, as elsewhere, representatives of the 

 isolating 1 and inflecting, as well as of the polysjnthetic 

 order of speech ? Does not their common structure point 

 at a common centre of dispersion, while their specific 

 diversity within this common groove is amply explained 

 by time and evanescence? 



But if Major Powell does not always reason conclu- 

 sively, he is a good observer, and describes in vivid lan- 

 guage the scenes of savage life of which he has been a 

 spectator, as witness the subjoined account of oral narra- 

 tive in the Indian community : — 



" ( n winter nights the Indians gather about the camp- 

 fire, and then the doings of the gods are recounted in 

 many a mythic tale. I have heard the venerable and im- 

 passioned orator on the camp-meeting stand rehearse the 

 story of the crucifixion, and have seen the thousands 

 gathered there weep in contemplation of the story of 

 divine suffering, and heard their shouts roll down the 

 forest aisles as they gave vent to their joy at the contem- 

 plation of redemption. But the scene was not a whit 



• The Othomi of the Anahuac tableland has been cited as an instance ot 

 an isolating language in America. But M. de Charancey rijhtly regards 

 Otliomi rather as ''une laDgue primitivement incorporate [polysynthetic], 

 qui. parvenue au dernier degre d'usure et de delabrement, a fini par prendre 

 les allures d'un dialecte a juxtaposition [isolation] (" Melanges de Philo- 

 logie," &c, p. 80, Paris, 1883). 



