l899-'00 TRANSACTIONS lOI 



imitation is at once a very limited and a very uncertain thing. It 

 is not everything that admits of being imitated, and one man's 

 imitation might differ considerably from another's. Above all we 

 cannot imitate thoughts. On the other hand there is no limit to 

 what may be done by conventional and traditional signs ; and it 

 is really not until language has assumed this character, that 

 it is marked off by an impassable line from such means of com- 

 munication as the lower animals possess. 



Languages have been classified by philologists — I mention the 

 principal divisions only — as poly synthetic, agglutinative, in- 

 flectional, analytic, and isolating. The speech^of the Indians of 

 this continent, in both its Northern and its Southern half, is of 

 the polys3mthetic order, and is believed to represent the most pri- 

 mitive form of rational human language. Professor Sayce sees 

 herein " a fresh proof that America is in truth the neiv world." 

 In polysynthetic speech a multitude of elements are crowded to- 

 gether in apparently unbroken connection. One word has no 

 difiiculty in picking up another, and unions are made which defy 

 analysis. It is by comparison with these languages that we are led 

 to see how abstract, and in a manner artificial, our own language 

 is. To us it seems quite natural that every object within range 

 of our perception should not only be set apart in thought, but 

 should have a term expressive of it in its individuality and isola- 

 tion. But not so with those who use the earlier forms of human 

 speech : they do not know tilings i?L themselves ; they have never 

 troubled their heads with the ding an sick. They know things 

 as related ; they express things as related. I forget what Indian 

 tongue it was in which the first missionaries could find no separate 

 word for father or son. There were words for my father, and 

 your father, and his father, and the next man's father, all kinds of 

 concrete living or deceased fathers, but no word in which the 

 concept, father, was isolated. So with the idea son. There was 

 no word that stood for son simply. When it came therefore to 

 translating for purposes of ritual the phrase ' ' Father, Son and 

 Holy Ghost, ' ' the best the missionaries could do was to take ex- 

 pressions which signified ' ' Our Father, His Son and their Holy 

 Ghost." Evidently such a language was very ill-adapted for 

 subtle definition or rigorous argument. We cannot imagine an 

 Augustine, an Aquinas or a Calvin giving his thought to the 

 world through such a medium. 



