Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/420

408, and, in spite of the hackneyed disapproval with which reviewers receive reprints of essays published in periodicals, it is much to be regretted that his essays have never been published in a collected form." In the North American Review for July, 1892, the distinguished President of McGill University, Sir J. William Dawson, refers to this "remarkable paper of Mr. Hale's" as "one which should commend itself to the study of every biblical scholar and archæologist." He adds: "In this paper Mr. Hale maintains the importance of language as a ground of ethnological classification, and there was his wide knowledge of the languages of American aborigines and other rude races to show that the grammatical complexity and logical perfection of those languages imply a high intellectual capacity in their original framers. . . . On similar grounds he shows us that it is not in the outlying barbarous races that we are to look for truly primitive man, since here we have merely degraded types, and that the primitive centers of man and language must have been in the old historic lands of western Asia and northern Africa."

In 1893 Mr. Hale was elected President of the American Folklore Society. He had previously contributed to the society's quarterly journal a series of articles on Huron Folklore from materials gathered in his visit to the "Underdon Reserve," on the Detroit River opposite to southern Michigan—the reserve appropriated to the small band of Wyandot Indians, less than a hundred, who alone in Canada retained the language, and with it the traditions, of the once numerous and powerful Huron people. In the same year he was invited to attend the International Congress of Anthropology, which was convened for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago. To this congress he contributed a paper entitled The Fall of Hochelaga, a Study of Popular Tradition, which appeared in the volume of Memoirs of the congress, and also in the Journal of the American Folklore Society for March, 1894. In this paper he was enabled, by employing the same methods of research and analysis by which he had in early life traced out the Polynesian migrations of two millenniums, to elucidate, by the aid of traditions which had been preserved for more than four centuries among the Canadian Hurons, a singular historical mystery, which had long perplexed the writers of North American annals. When the explorer Jacques Cartier, in 1535, discovered and ascended the St. Lawrence River, he found its shores, from what is now the site of Quebec to what is now the site of Montreal, occupied by what he styled the "kingdom of Hochelaga." Its "great king and lord," from his capital at the last-named place, ruled over several communities of partly civilized Indians, who spoke a language of the Huron-Iroquois stock.