Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/136

116 if princes came to speak with him he would answer; but none present being such, he thought himself obliged, in honor, to hold his tongue and not hold discourse with such persons below his birth and quality.’ ”

Practically, however, the truth must be told, that, in spite of all the epithets of royalty and state which our own Puritan ancestors connected with the Indians, as a matter of fact they very soon came to regard and treat the savages as a kind of vermin of the woods, combining all the offensive and hideous qualities and subtleties of snakes, wolves, bears, wild-cats, skunks, and panthers, with a bloodthirstiness and ferocity exceeding them all. This was the estimate of the noble Indian by those who had heard his yells and felt his tomahawk in actual conflict.

The subject of the languages spoken by our aborigines is too comprehensive and intricate a one for discussion here. Our authorities differ widely on this theme, as to the number of the vocabularies, which of them are languages, which are dialects, their constructions, root-terms, inflections, etc. They used very long words, with affixes and suffixes of many syllables, and of many letters, especially consonants, in each syllable. Cotton Mather said some of their words had been growing ever since the confusion of tongues at Babel. It must have required some intellectual vigor and a grasp of memory in Indian children to master their speech. It is doubtful if any affinity can be detected in their vocabularies or in the structure of their languages with those of any other continent of the globe. As might be expected, their languages are rich and copious as relating to common life and common things, objects, matters of sense, but very deficient and scant for the processes and expression of mental and spiritual activity, conceptions, and abstractions. For instance, the speech of the Delawares was found to have ten very different names for a bear, according to age, sex, etc. The limited resources of their speech explain to us the rhetorical and figurative character of Indian