Apbh, 27, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



643 



our reports as can be guaranteed only by 

 philological accuracy of the record, can 

 we hope to accumulate material that will be 

 a safe guide to future studies. 



The time must come when we must de- 

 mand that collections of traditions obtained 

 by means of the garbled English of inter- 

 preters, descriptions of customs not sup- 

 ported by native evidence, records of in- 

 dustries based only on the objective ob- 

 servation of the student, must be consid- 

 ered inadequate, and that we must demand 

 from the serious student the same degree 

 of philological accuracy which has become 

 the standard in your sciences. 



It is true that in many eases this ideal 

 can not be obtained. The general break- 

 down of native culture, the fewness of 

 numbers of certain tribes, the necessity of 

 rapidly accumulating vanishing material, 

 may sometimes compel the student, much 

 against his will, to adopt methods of col- 

 lecting which he recognizes as inadequate. 

 Nevertheless, an important step forward 

 will be made if we acknowledge that such 

 collections are makeshifts that should be 

 supplemented as soon as feasible, and 

 wherever feasible, by more painstaking 

 records. 



Taking this standard as a guide, we must 

 acknowledge that very little, if any, of our 

 literature is sufficiently authentic. Per- 

 haps the most valuable material that has 

 been collected from this point of view is 

 the long series of texts obtained from the 

 Ponka and Omaha by the late James Owen 

 Dorsey. It is true that they embrace only 

 a limited aspect of the life of the tribe, but 

 so far as they go, they give us a deep in- 

 sight into the mode of thought of the 

 Indian. In the whole range of American 

 anthropological literature there is hardly 

 anything that may be compared to this 

 publication. We have short series of texts 

 from a few tribes which are highly wel- 

 come, but as they stand, they are but frag- 



ments of what is required. The tribes thus 

 treated are the Sioux, the Klamath of Ore- 

 gon, the Kwakiutl, the Chinook and the 

 Haida, and there is also a considerable 

 amount of material available from the 

 Eskimo, although most of the published 

 material in that language is overlaid with 

 Danish culture. 



If we consider the whole range of native 

 life that should be treated in the same man- 

 ner, we see how utterly inadequate the 

 available collections are. To take, as an 

 instance, the best— that of Mr. Dorsey — 

 the contents of the volume are a collection 

 of myths, records of war-expeditions and a 

 long series of personal letters. These 

 topics cover only a narrow range of the life 

 of the Ponka. The whole material culture, 

 their knowledge of the country and of 

 neighboring tribes, their rituals and ritual- 

 istic myths, their social organization, their 

 beliefs have not been recorded, and are 

 known to us only by brief notes collected 

 by the author. 



If we acknowledge the correctness of the 

 requirements here outlined, the work that 

 is before us is stupendous. Let me remind 

 you that in North America we have prob- 

 ably about fifty-five distinct linguistic 

 stocks and at least three hundred and fifty 

 distinct dialects. If full information on 

 all of these is to be gathered, the most in- 

 tensive work of a great number of students 

 is immediately required, because the in- 

 formation is rapidly disappearing, and 

 probably almost all of it will be lost inside 

 of fifty years. The demand for thorough- 

 ness of method of collection must, there- 

 fore, be brought forward with great em- 

 phasis. 



I have spoken here of the linguistic and 

 historical method only as an adjunct of 

 ethnological research. It is, however, true 

 that the linguistic problem itself is one of 

 intense interest, and one which will gain by 

 a knowledge of the methods applied by 



