April 30, 1886. J 



401 



influence of a powerful faculty which the author 

 has omitted, in this and other cases, to take suffi- 

 ciently into account, — the faculty of imagination. 

 The English language teaches us a lesson on this 

 special point. In ordinary speech the adjective 

 precedes its substantive ; but the moment the 

 language rises into poetry, the order tends to be 

 reversed ; and the higher the imagination, the 

 stronger this tendency appears. 

 Thus we have in Byron — 



" Adieu, adieu ! My native shore 

 Fades o'er the waters blue " 



And in Scott — 



" Announced by prophet sooth and old. 

 Doomed doubtless for achievement bold." 



And still more strikingly in Milton's picturesque 

 epithets — 



" Meadows trim, and daisies pied. 

 Shallow brooks, and rivers wide." 1 



We can understand how a vivid fancy may 

 bring the object itself first before the mental 

 vision, and that a momentary delay may be 

 needed to discriminate and express its most strik- 

 ing qualities. There is no question, also, that the 

 Iroquois, like the Italians, are a highly imagina- 

 tive people, much given, as the reports of their 

 councils show, to poetical improvisations. And 

 finally, if we are to inquire to what influences 

 both Italians and Iroquois owe their imaginative 

 powers, we may perhaps find them in what Buckle 

 would have called the ' aspects of nature,' — the 

 mountains, rivers, forests, and seas which sur- 

 round them. 



Mr. Byrne is of opinion that the 'inflected' 

 idioms — a class which he restricts to the Indo- 

 European and Semitic tongues — indicate the 

 highest grade of intellect in their speakers. Our 

 pride of race would lead us blushingly to accept 

 this compliment, until we find that we must share 

 it with various barbarous septs, whom this pride 

 of race would look down upon. Mr. Byrne, like 

 other European scholars, — who cannot be alto- 

 gether acquitted of race-prejudice in this respect, — 

 has overlooked the fact that among the aboriginal 

 tribes of America are several whose languages are 

 as clearly inflective as the Greek or Arabic. Thus 

 in Zeisberger's ' Delaware grammar ' we find, as 

 derivatives of luen (' to say '), rCdellan (' I say to 

 thee '), lellane (< if I say to thee '), lake (' if I say to 

 him '), and, in the imperative, ill ( l say thou '), luel 

 (' say on '), lil (< say to me '), lo (' say to him and 

 the like. Pages might be filled with such ex- 

 amples of simple inflection, which, while they 

 show clearly enough the polysynthetic cast of the 

 language, have no more trace of the agglutinative 

 cast than is to be found in any language of Eu- 

 rope. Duponceau, who translated this grammar 



sixty years ago, remarked, in reference to the 

 views which had been expressed on the subject by 

 Baron William von Humboldt, ' ' The learned baron 

 will, I hope, recognize in the conjugations of the 

 Delaware verbs those inflected forms which he 

 justly admires ; and he will find that the process 

 which he is pleased to call ' agglutination ' is not 

 the only one which our Indians employ in the 

 combination of their ideas and the formation of 

 their words." The Delaware is not alone. On the 

 other side of the continent, in the languages of 

 Oregon, pure inflections abound. Thus the Sahap- 

 tin, as is shown in the excellent grammar of the 

 Rev. A. B. Smith, has the substantive verb, hiwash 

 (' to be '), — used, it may be remarked, exactly like 

 our own substantive verb, — w r hich in the ' remote 

 past ' tense makes waka (a as in ' father '), ' I was,' 

 and in the ' recent past,' waka (d as in ' wall '), 4 1 

 have just been ; ' the only difference being in the 

 change of the vowel -sound, precisely as in a 

 Semitic conjugation. 



What, then, shall we say ? Shall we refuse to 

 accept inflections as a proof of mental power ? Or 

 shall we more generously — and perhaps more 

 scientifically — admit that they prove the barba- 

 rous speakers of these inflected American tongues 

 to be equal in natural capacity to our own barba- 

 rous ancestors, the gifted inventors of the Aryan 

 speech ? 



In spite, however, of such minor oversights, Mr. 

 Byrne's work must be pronounced one of the most 

 important and valuable among recent contribu- 

 tions to linguistic and ethnological science. The 

 correctness of its main principles cannot reason- 

 ably be questioned ; and the amount of informa- 

 tion which the author has brought together and 

 happily condensed, respecting a vast variety of 

 languages spoken in every quarter of the globe, 

 will make his treatise a treasury of reference for 

 philologists. H. Hale. 



THEORETICAL OPTICS. 



The wave theory of light was so firmly estab- 

 lished by the labors of Fresnel from 1815 to 1827, 

 that but few leaders in physical science continued 

 to defend the Newtonian theory after that time. 

 The only logical objection to the undulatory the- 

 ory was its supposed incapacity to explain the 

 phenomenon of dispersion, although Fresnel had, 

 with an acuteness almost peculiar to himself, 

 suggested, as early as 1822, that this might find 

 its explanation in the fact that the molecules of 

 a transparent substance are not separated by 



Theoretische optik gegriindet auf das Bessel Sellmeier'- 

 sche princip. Zugleich mit den experimentellen belegen. 

 Von Dr. E. Ketteler Braunschweig, Vieweg, 1885. 8°. 



