When there shall be three signs on a tree,
Father, son and grandson hanging dead on the same tree;
When the battle flag shall be raised,
And the people scattered abroad in the forests.
Such poems properly belong to the mythologic class. This class was fully represented in the productions of the primitive bards, but chiefly owing to the prejudices of the early missionaries, the examples remaining are few.
I could continue to bring before you specimens of this quaint and ancient lore. My garner is by no means emptied. But probably I have said enough for my purpose. You see that the study of the aboriginal poetry of our continent opens up an unexpectedly rich field for investigation. It throws a new light not only on the folk songs of other nations, but on the general history of the growth of the poetic faculty. More than this, it elevates our opinion of the nations whom we are accustomed to call by the terms savage and barbarous. We are taught that in much which we are inclined to claim as our special prerogatives, they too have an interest. In the most precious possessions of the race, in its aspirations for the infinite and the forever true, they also have a share. They likewise partake, and in no mean degree, of that sweetest heritage of man, the glorious gift of song, “the vision and the faculty divine.”
PART IV.
LINGUISTIC.
INTRODUCTORY.
The processes, psychical and logical, which lie at the basis and modify the forms of articulate speech, have yet to be defined and classified in a manner to secure the general acceptance of scholars. While these processes are operative and recognizable in all languages, it has ever seemed to me that they are more apparent and transparent in the unwritten tongues of savage tribes. As the stream is more diaphanous near its source, as the problem of organic life is more readily studied in the lowest groups of animals and vegetables, by such analogies we are prompted to select the uncultured speech of the rudest of our race to discover the laws of growth in human expression.
Though such laws are not precisely the same throughout space and time, they unquestionably partake of the same uniformity as we note in other natural phenomena, and no language has yet been reported which stands alone in its formation.