Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/481

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As the above list shows, the passion for experimentation so marked in Cushing's boyhood remained with him to the last. The essays on "Primitive Copper-Working" (No. 12), "Shoreland Pottery" (No. 13), and the "Arrow" (No. 14), present brilliant examples of this faculty for the discovery of unknown methods by actual experimenting. How great this was in him the diverse labors of "flint-flaking," "copper-working," and "pit-made pottery" indicated. Cushing was himself the proof of one of the theories he held to most strongly; viz., that many human arts have been discovered and forgotten, rediscovered in diverse ages and different peoples, found and lost and refound time and again, invented and reinvented not once, but many times.

His studies of primitive life (Nos. 1, 2, 6, 7, 19) reveal to us how far he penetrated into the arcana of primitive society and aboriginal thought. His essay on "Zuñi Fetiches" (No. 1), in which he had the help of the Zuñis themselves, exhibits a breadth of philosophy, a sympathetic interpretation of the ideas of another race, and a grasp of the things beneath the surface, which so many observers miss, appearing again and again in his masterpiece, the "Zuñi Creation Myths" (No. 6). This last is an undying monument to his zeal, his genial insight, his poetic fervor, and power to shape our language to portray the Iliad of a race as wonderful as the Greeks of old. His address on "Primitive Motherhood" is the most glowing and yet never untruthful tribute paid by any white man, poet or prosaist, to the "better halves" of primitive man, whose essential humanity, affection, and true womanliness lift the races below ours into the unmistakable kinship of all mankind. Interpretative studies like those on "Pottery" (No. 3), and "Manual Concepts" (No. 9), exhibit Cushing's remarkable talent in coordinating the various elements of primitive life, the rise of some of which, or of all of which, marks progress in culture. The article on "Manual Concepts" evidences also his wonderful grasp of the psychology of Zuñi speech, examples of which also appear in his mythological studies. As an explorer where the living are absent, he appears to advantage in his Floridian Archaeological Studies (No. 16).

To sum up: In Cushing, archæologist, linguist, folk-lorist, science has lost an anthropologist of the highest order. His death, at the