Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/417

Rh Confederacy (who, though belonging to the Algonkin family, may from their character and achievements be styled the Iroquois of the Northwest), was prepared by Mr. Hale, partly from his own minutes, gathered in Oregon in former years, and partly from materials supplied by his correspondence with two highly esteemed missionaries, Catholic and Methodist—the Rev. Father Albert Lacombe and the Rev. Dr. John McLean. This report was presented in 1885, and proved of so much interest that before it appeared in the association's volume it was published in the English periodical Nature, and was thence reprinted in the American Popular Science Monthly. In this report, as well as in his annotations on the third report, prepared partly by his experienced collaborator, the Rev. E. F. Wilson (well known as the founder of the Shingwauk Home at the Sault Ste. Marie), Mr. Hale sought to show that the remarkable superiority of the Blackfoot Indians to the other Algonkins is due to an admixture of blood with the Kootenays of British Columbia, whose singular mental endowments are set forth in two of the subsequent reports, the sixth and eighth. All the reports after the third, with the exception of the eighth, which is by Dr. A. F. Chamberlain, formerly of Toronto University and now of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., have been prepared by Dr. Franz Boas, formerly editor of Science, who, like Mr. Wilson and Dr. Chamberlain, was invited by Mr. Hale to carry on the investigations. The reports, usually prefaced by introductory remarks of the editor, have been of considerable length, some of them comprising many pictorial illustrations, and have proved a conspicuous feature of the recent volumes of the British Association. They have been considered of so much importance that the Canadian Parliament has twice supplemented by considerable money grants the sums liberally appropriated for the committee's work by the British Association. The fifth report contained a colored "linguistic map" of British Columbia, prepared at Mr. Hale's suggestion, and supplementing his ethnographical map of Oregon, already noticed. This British Columbian map showed five linguistic stocks, additional to the twelve stocks comprised in the Oregon map, thus evidencing the existence of no less than seventeen language families in an area not larger than the British Islands. This remarkable fact, with some similar instances in other parts of the world, offered one of the most perplexing enigmas of philological science.

This enigma Mr. Hale undertook to solve in an address delivered in 1886 before the Section of Anthropology in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which association he had been elected one of the vice-presidents and chairman of that section. The address was on The Origin of