Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/823

 bordering crags; pive, the nuts of the edible pine, they found on the foot-hills, and use, the fruit of the yucca, in sunny glades—and nant, the meschal crowns, for their feasts—and chuar, the cactus-apple, from which to make their wine; reeds grew about the lakes for their arrow shafts; the rocks were full of flints for their barbs and knives, and away down in the cañon they found a pipe-stone quarry, and on the hills they found arraumpive, their tobacco. Oh, it was a beautiful land that was given to these, the favorites of the gods! The descendants of these people are the present Kaibabits of northern Arizona. Those who escaped by the way, through the wicked curiosity of the younger Shi-nau-av, scattered over the country and became Navajos, Moquis, Sioux, Comanches, Spaniards, Americans—poor, sorry fragments of people without the original language of the gods, and only able to talk in imperfect jargons.

The Hebrew philosopher tells us that on the plains of Shinar the people of the world were gathered to build a city and erect a tower the summit of which should reach above the waves of any flood Jehovah might send. But their tongues were confused as a punishment for their impiety.

The philosopher of science tells us that mankind was widely scattered over the earth anterior to the development of articulate speech, that the languages of which we are cognizant sprung from innumerable centers as each little tribe developed its own language, and that in the study of any language an orderly succession of events may be discovered in its evolution from a few simple holophrastic locutions to a complex language with a multiplicity of words and an elaborate grammatic structure, by the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

A Cough.—A man coughs. In explanation the Ute philosopher would tell us that an unupits—a pygmy spirit of evil—had entered the poor man's stomach, and he would charge the invalid with having whistled at night; for in their philosophy it is taught that if a man whistles at night, when the pygmy spirits are abroad, one is sure to go through the open door into the stomach, and the evidence of this disaster is found in the cough which the unupits causes. Then the evil spirit must be driven out, and the medicine-man stretches his patient on the ground and scarifies him with the claws of eagles from head to heel, and while performing the scarification a group of men and women stand about, forming a chorus, and medicine-man and chorus perform a fugue in gloomy ululation, for these wicked spirits will depart only by incantations and scarifications. In our folk-lore philosophy a cough is caused by a "cold," whatever that may be—a vague entity—that must be treated first according to the maxim "Feed a cold and starve a fever," and the "cold" is driven away by potations of bitter teas.

In our medical philosophy a cough may be the result of a clogging