310 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. II. No. 36. 



the first iustallmeut of this series being a pon- 

 derous quarto volume of Indian texU (mj'ths, 

 animal stories, legends and correspondence) 

 with notes and translation, proves that Dorsey 

 was inspired by the same thoughts. 



The Chinook family of dialects is too little 

 known even at the present time, but Boas has 

 made an excellent beginning by filling one of 

 J. W. Powells' Bulletins of the Bureau of Eth- 

 nology^ octavo size, with ' Chinook Texts ' gath- 

 ered by himself. These were all obtained from 

 a gifted man of the tribe, Charles Cultee, who 

 is a true storehouse of aboriginal folk-lore and 

 speaks also the Kathlamet dialect of this same 

 stock. From him Boas obtained eighteen na- 

 tional myths and animal stories, followed by a 

 series of ' beliefs, customs and tales, ' wifh. some 

 historical reports. These texts were written 

 down during the seasons 1890 and I89I at Bay 

 Center, Pacific county, Washington, not very far 

 from the Old Chinook home at the mouth of 

 Columbia River. By a sentiment of grateful 

 remembrance the explorer had the portrait of 

 Cultee placed at the head of the volume which 

 contains 278 pages, and was issued late in 1894 

 from the Government Printing Office in Wash- 

 ington. 



Dr. Boas' scientific alphabet had to be very 

 special and flexible to express the sounds of 

 Chinook, a tongue which people will hardly 

 venture to call sonorous or euphonious, for it 

 abounds in consonantal combinations, and more 

 so at the end of the words than elsewhere. The 

 word-accent is never placed upon the ultima, 

 but always on the penult or ante-penult, and 

 this is the law of the language which made con- 

 sonantal clusters possible in the final syllables. 

 The Shawnee, of the Algonkinian stock, has an 

 opposite law ; it has the tendency to emphasize 

 words at the end or ultima, and hence we find 

 vowel ' elisions and consonantal accumulations 

 in the beginning of the words. 



As for the contents of the Chinook stories in 

 which fish, ravens and gulls, cranes, robins and 

 panthers are anthromorphized extensively and 

 much of the Active matter is presented in collo- 

 quial form, we may state that some are out- 

 rageously queer and weird ; others reveal a 

 poetic vein beneath many things that seem odd 

 and nonsensical, puerile and childish to us. 



What refers to the religion of these natives ap- 

 pears very strange, and many will be prompted 

 to exclaim: "Why! for religion, this is de- 

 cidedly ungodly ! ' ' Indeed, we cannot expect 

 that our religious sentiments, which are half 

 Aryan and half Semitic, could ever agree with 

 those of the red man's tenets, beliefs and inspir- 

 ations. But our religion is all abstraction and 

 theirs is all nature, life and animism. The re- 

 ligious aspects of the primitive man tolerates 

 nothing that is not based on forms and facts of 

 concrete life. The present reviewer is firmly 

 convinced that any white man's opinion con- 

 cerning the tendencies pervading Chinook folk- 

 lore and similar products of aboriginal peoples 

 is premature and hence erroneous, unless all the 

 bearings and characteristics of this literature 

 have been assiduously studied. Many of us 

 think it is easy to judge the genuine mental 

 products of the American native from our points 

 of view ; on the contrary, it is extremely difii- 

 cult, and the more we study these products, the 

 more the difficulties increase. A. S. G. 



The Life and Traditions of the Bed Man. Joseph 

 NicoLAR. Bangor, Me., 1893. Pp. 147. 

 Joseph Nicolar is an Indian of the Penobscot 

 tribe settled on islands in the Penobscot River, 

 Maine, and counting about 400 people. These In- 

 dians are quite industrious and inventive ; they 

 construct birch bark canoes and manufacture 

 basketry of very ueat patterns, which they sell 

 either at the neighboring town of Old Town, or 

 at the watering places of the seaside of the New 

 England coast. The Penobscot Indians adhere 

 to the Roman Catholic faith, which was planted 

 among them in the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century. Mr. Nicolar has made it a life-task to 

 study, publish and propagate the folklore of his 

 own people and in 1893 published to this effect 

 'The Life and Traditions of the Bed Man.'' It 

 is an interesting collection of 147 pages, which 

 for graphic qualities and fluency of style rivals 

 any similar production of the white man. It 

 describes the ancient customs and beliefs, not of 

 the Indian in general, as the title would make 

 us believe, but only of the AbnAkis or New Eng- 

 land Indians of Algonkin race and language, 

 who are subdivided into Peuobscots, Passama- 

 quoddies, Micmacs and St. Francis Indians. 



