IMPORTANCE OF RECORDESTG UJSTWEITTEN LITERATURES. 3 



mentaiy would our knowledge of Latin and Greek be, if the poets, orators, 

 and historians who wrote their compositions in these sonorous idioms were 

 lost, and if nothing in them had come down to our age but versions of 

 foreign books and reproductions of foreign speculations and ideas! A 

 writer or informant is most capable of acquainting us with matters concern- 

 hig his own people, country, and epoch, because he feels more interested in 

 these topics than in any others, and he will select from the national stock 

 of words the proper term for each object or idea he desires to express. 

 Investigators will therefore, when they address themselves to intelligent 

 natives for national, tangible and concrete topics of every-day life, gener- 

 ally obtain correct and trustworthy information on their objects of research, 

 but will meet with disappointment when inquiring for equivalents of terms 

 or ideas totally foreign to the simple understanding of the native pop- 

 ulation. 



An expeiience of short duration will convince any linguistic investi- 

 gator that a multitude of characteristic, quaint, and unfrequent expressions, 

 idioms, phrases, and inflectional forms can never be obtained by mere ques- 

 tioning. The natives must be allowed to speak out their own free minds, 

 without bias or trammelling; after a short acquaintance they can easily be 

 induced to recount popular stories, myths, incidents of history, or intertribal 

 wars, to reproduce speeches and national songs from their OAvn reminis- 

 cences, and thus they will spontaneously use peculiar forms of language 

 which often yield a deeper insight into the genius of their vernacular idiom 

 than pages of information gathered after the usual method of the scholarly 

 lexicographer or the pedantic verbal translator. 



Legends, myths, and lyric productions, when obtained in their original 

 shape from unsophisticated relators, furnish us with the best material for 

 inquiries into a far remote antiquit}^, even when the historic horizon of the 

 informant's tribe does not exceed the limit of two generations. If facts and 

 dates do not, words and radical syllables will tell us a tale, and may enable us 

 to trace ancient migrations or intertribal connections, teach us the origin of 

 certain customs, habits, or national ideas, and inform lis of the shaping, the 

 material, or uses of old implements. In some instances they will guide us 

 iuto remoter periods than prehistoric archseology can, and supply us with 



