THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. 125- 



duced during tlie brief term of our intercourse with them, we must 

 feel satisfied tliat the people to whom these leaders belonged were far 

 above the common rank. As men like Solon, Miltiades, Themistocles^ 

 Pericles, Epaminondas, Phocion, and the i-est of the long line of Greek 

 Avorthies, must have sprung from a highly gifted community, so we 

 may be sure that forest statesmen and leaders like Powhatan, Philip 

 of Pokanoket, Miautonomah, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Black Hawk, and, in 

 our own day, Poundraaker and Crowfoot, — men who have won the 

 respect and admiration even of their enemies, — could only have arisen 

 among a people of character and talents corresponding in elevation to 

 their own. 



Still another American race may be mentioned, the Iroquois, about 

 whose remarkable abilities there can be no c[uestion. As is well known,, 

 their famous confederacy, the Five Nations, held, for a long time 

 after the Frencli and English colonies were founded, the balance of 

 power in North America. If they had not, by their hostility to the 

 Huron and Algonkin allies of the French, been led to cast their in- 

 fluence on the side of the English, it is the opinion of competent 

 historians that the whole region west of the Alleghanies, from Canada 

 to the Gulf of Mexico, would now be French. Their haj^tpily devised 

 political system, unsurpassed in ancient or modern times, has been 

 well elucidated by the penetrative genius of Morgan. Their oratory, 

 their sagacity, and their prowess have been celebrated by many emi- 

 nent writers. In their highest pi'osperit}^, their numbers did not 

 exceed, probably did not reach, twenty thousand souls. It may fairly 

 be afiirmed that, since the world began, so much intellectual force, 

 public spirit, eloquence, statesmanship, and military skill have never, to 

 our knowledge, been elsewhere concentrated in so small a community 

 as that which composed the Iroquois cantons of northern New York 

 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 



The language spoken by this people, — a highly inflected, rich, and 

 sonorous tongue,^ — is too well known to American scholars to need a 

 minute description. Its stately vocables, fortunately preserved in the 

 names of places, have rescued some of the finest natural features of 

 our continent from the ignoble baptism whicL has elsewhere degraded 

 others. Onondaga, Oneida, Ontario, Saratoga, Toronto, Ticonderoga, 

 Adirondack, — each a descriptive compound,. — mark the euphonic 



