Archeology and Anthropology. 855 
the labor. He mentioned their aptness in mechanical arts and their 
strict idea of property. They were highly superstitious and did 
many things to secure good fortune. A whole tribe would get 
baptized by the missionary in order to change their luck, and when 
their luck did not change the missionary had to. Their numbers 
were diminishing, but this was due principally to changes in diet 
and clothing, for in that climate the canned beef and cotton over- 
alls of the white proved but poor substitutes for seal-fat on the 
inside and sealskin without. 
Dr. D. G. Brinton, of Media, Penna., described some “ Traits of 
Primitive Speech.” His abstract was as follows: 
nguage was not born in a day. Primitive utterance was of 
single or double consonants. These consonantal sounds were sixty- 
three innumber. The labials expressed the idea of time and space, 
the dentals the termination of force, the nasals motion in repetition, 
the gutterals motion in curves, the “h” ideas of command. The 
Cree language, to quote from the same authority, resembles the 
Tinne no more closely than does the French the Chinese. Never- 
theless, the same peculiarity of materially significant phonetic 
elements is discovered. I find but little, yet some, evidence in the 
different groups of American tongues in favor of the theory which 
maintains that there is some fixed relation between sound and sense 
in the radicals of languages. “N?” expresses the notion of the 
€7°, or myselfness in many languages. “ K ” is associated with the 
idea of otherness. In many American languages the phonetic 
elements are vague and fluctuating. In referring to the Klamath 
language Dr. Behrend writes: “The same person pronounces the 
same word differently and when his attention is called to it he will 
insist that it is the same.” Some of the consonantal sounds are 
not true elementary sounds, but in primitive languages had to have 
Some other consonant associated with them. Phonetic elements 
were often inadequate to express the idea. In the Indian languages, 
emphasis, action, and modification of the vocal expressions seem to 
