342 



NA TURE 



[August 7, ii 



Canienga Chief, David of Schoharie. The other, written 

 by one "John Green," of the Mohawk Institute at Brant- 

 ford, and dated November 1874, > s based on an unknown 

 text differing in some respects from that attributed to 

 Chief David. The Onondaga is not a copy of the 

 Canienga work, but its complement, comprising the 

 speeches addressed by the younger to the elder nations 

 when a chief of the latter is mourned, and hence named 

 the "Book of the Younger Nations." All the original 

 texts may possibly have been composed about the middle 

 of the eighteenth century, by which time several of the 

 natives had been sufficiently instructed by the English 

 missionaries to read and write their mother tongue 

 fluently. 



Such is briefly the history of the " Book of Rites" in its 

 written form, which consists mainly of the speeches, songs, 

 formulas, and ceremonies performed at the meetings of 

 the Great Council, or " Council of Condolence," of the 

 Iroquois Confederacy, when it met for the combined pur- 

 pose of mourning the death of a chief and celebrating 

 the induction of his successor. The proceedings to be 

 observed on this important occasion had evidently been 

 handed down orally from the time of the formation of the 

 famous League, or " Great Peace," an event usually referred 

 to the middle of the fifteenth century. Much of the contents 

 of the "Book of Rites" may therefore fairly claim to date 

 from that period. But although the strictly ceremonial por- 

 tions may have been written down in the very words in 

 which they had been orally preserved for some three 

 hundred years, the text as it now stands has obviously 

 been coloured by the spirit of the eighteenth century, and 

 is, so far, not a faithful reflection of the social ideas and 

 inner life of the Iroquois nation in pie-European and 

 pagan times.'' Such passages as " The Great League 

 which you established has grown old"; " Hail, my grand- 

 sires ! You have said that sad will be the fate of those 

 who come in the latter times " : " ye are in your graves 

 who established it [the League]. Ye have taken it with 

 you and have placed it under you, and there is nothing 

 left but a desert," were written by men who felt that the 

 Confederacy was already a thing of the past. The whole 

 tone.of the work is in fact pervaded by a spirit of sadness 

 and despondency, and its very scope seems to have been 

 the preservation of the empty forms and ceremonials of an 

 institution whose days were already numbered. This 

 point should be borne in mind in reading the comments 

 of the editor on the present text, and especially the argu- 

 ments drawn from it in favour of the superiority of the 

 Iroquois race over " the Aryans of Europe" in humanity, 

 public spirit, and political sagacity. The curious theory 

 is even advanced that the fine qualities of the European 

 Aryan, as compared with his barbarous Asiatic kindred, 

 "may have been derived from admixture with an earlier 

 population of Europe, identical in race and character with 

 the aborigines of America " (Introduction, p. 98). And 

 in an unfortunate appendix, where this idea is worked out 

 at some length, it is suggested that the time is approach- 

 ing when the " servile Aryans will cease to attract the 

 undue admiration which they have received for qualities 

 not their own : and we shall look with a new interest on 

 the remnant of the Indian race, as possibly representing 

 this noble type of man, whose inextinguishable love of 

 freedom has evoked the idea of political rights and has 

 created those institutions of regulated self-government by 

 which genuine civilisation and progress are assured to 

 the world " (p. 190). 



Mr. Hale is more instructive in the section of his 

 erudite introduction devoted to the genius and inner struc- 

 ture of the Iroquois language. Here he shows, against the 

 general conclusions of philologists, that Iroquois really 

 abounds in true abstract terms. Such are olaiitaiscra = 

 heat, atariatitsera = courage, kanaiisera = pride, kanak- 

 ivcnsera = anger, regularly derived by the affix sera from 

 verbal forms. He also makes it clear that true gram- 



matical gender exists, forming, as in the Semitic system 

 and in some neo-Sanskritic idioms, a distinctive feature 

 of verbal conjugation. But its use is entirely restricted to 

 the third person singular, dual and plural, as in watkah- 

 tfls = she sees, kiatkahtos = they two see (fem.), kont- 

 kahtos = they see (fern.). This point is of great import- 

 ance as affecting the various psychological systems of 

 linguistic classification that have been proposed by certain 

 German theorists. It may be incidentally remarked that 

 in Africa also the distinction between gender (Hamitic) 

 and non-gender (Negro) languages no longer holds good : 

 for it now appears that gender is also characteristic of the 

 Masai, and of many Nilotic negro tongues. 



Dealing with the tendency of Iroquois and so ninny 

 other American languages to fuse the terms of the sen- 

 tence into a single compound word, Mr. Hale observes : 

 " The notion that the existence of these comprehensive 

 woids in an Indian language is an evidence of deficiency 

 in anal) tic power, is a fallacy long ago exposed by . . . 

 Duponceau. As he has well explained, analysis must 

 precede synthesis. In fact, the power of what may be 

 termed analytic synthesis — the mental power which first 

 resolves words or things into their elements and then puts 

 them together in new forms — is a creative or co-ordina- 

 tive force indicative of a higher natural capacity than the 

 act of mere analysis. The genius which framed the word 

 ' teskenonhweronne/ [' 1 come hither again to greet and 

 thank'] is the same that, working with other elements, 

 produced the steam-engine and the telephone " (p. 150). 

 Here again it is to be feared that bias has got the better 

 of reason. Certainly the world would have had to wait 

 very long indeed for the steam-engine and the telephone 

 had their invention depended on the natural evolution oi 

 the people who " framed the word " in question. I'rol. 

 Sayce (" Science of Language ") has also made it toler- 

 ably evident that analysis does not precede synthesis, and 

 that the unit or starting-point of speech is rather the 

 sentence than the word. Hence the American polysyn- 

 thetic is an infantile compared with the English analytical 

 process in the example appealed to. But, apart from 

 these eccentric views, it is a great pleasure to be able to 

 say that Mr. Hale has given us an admirable edition of 

 the " Book of Rites " — a priceless treasure opportunely 

 rescued by him from the imminent danger of destruction. 



An equal share of praise is due to Dr. Brinton as editor 

 of the " Giieguence," which forms the third volume of his 

 Library Series. This curious document presents con- 

 siderable interest, both from the ethnological, philological, 

 and literary points of view. An original native drama in 

 the strict sense it can hardly be called. But although 

 dating no further back than the last century, and com- 

 posed in a strange medley of bad Spanish and Nahuatl 

 (Aztec), it may be regarded as almost the last surviving 

 specimen of the aboriginal semi-dramatic compositions 

 which appear to have been in common use amongst the 

 Central American peoples long before and after the Con- 

 quest. Such compositions, prepared for oral recitation 

 at the public feasts and ceremonies, were so far dramatical 

 that they took the form of dialogue, and turned on some 

 simple incident with a happy denouement. In the present 

 instance the Giieguence, that is', the elder or village head- 

 man (from the Aztec " huehuentzi " — " dear old man "), is 

 brought with his two sons before the provincial governor, 

 charged with entering the province without a permit. 

 This leads to a good deal of repartee, some broad jokes, 

 and intentional misunderstandings on the part of the 

 hero, who in the end comes off best and manages to 

 bring about a marriage between one of his sons and the 

 governor's daughter. The language of the piece is very 

 peculiar, and will doubtless be appealed to by the advo- 

 cates of mixed forms of speech in favour of their views. 

 Yet a careful study of the text shows that here the 

 Spanish and Aztec elements are not harmoniously fused, 

 as are, for instance, the Saxon and Latin elements in 



