accomplished bibliographer like his elder brother, and had a fondness for antiquarian and genealogical research. He did very valuable service in transcribing from European archives manuscripts relating to the history of the United States. Witness, for example, his famous work in twentyfive folio volumes, "Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America," a collection of documents illustrative of American history during the Revolution.

An account was given of his greatest work, "Catalogue Index of Manuscripts in the Archives of England, France, Holland and Spain, Relating to America, 1763 to 1783," in the Report of the Council of this Society, read at its semi-annual meeting in April, 1904.

Mr. Stevens died on March 5, 1902, and his widow died July 22, in the following year. They were buried at Kensal Green in the same grave with Mrs. Stevens's father, Charles Whittingham.

The brothers Henry and Benjamin Stevens were always staunch Americans. The former spoke of himself as a Green Mountain boy and not infrequently put the words G. M. B. after his name, as a title. Benjamin Stevens was equally patriotic, and always retained a warm affection for the home of his boyhood and for his father and mother, with whom he kept up a frequent correspondence during their lives. He remembered, too, his relatives and the companions of his early years. He had a pretty place at Surbiton, not too far from London, and when it became his property he changed its name to "The Sheaves," the name of his father's home in Barnet. He found in this place satisfaction for his strong love of nature and for his great interest in gardening. He had wild and cultivated plants, shrubs and trees sent to him from his old home in Vermont to plant in his garden, and took great delight in his nearness to these acquaintances and friends of his boyhood.

A student of Mr. Stevens's life is sure to be impressed by the amount of work which he did. He was steadily busy, but labored quietly and accomplished much. It is said that a favorite proverb of his was, "Do nothing without consideration, but when you have done anything repent not." He was a man of marked public spirit and of geniality and strength of character. The latter qualities

made him sought for as an arbiter, and successful in such a capacity. He was very social. Henry Stevens and his brother Benjamin were scholars and gentlemen, like the Plantins and other old printers and publishers.

A Memoir of Benjamin Franklin Stevens, by G. Manville Fenn, was privately printed in London at the Chiswick Press, in 1903. From that work the particulars of his life given in this sketch have been mainly taken. Mr. Stevens became a member of this Society, October 21, 1896.

For the Council,

S. S. G.

EDWARD E. HALE,
NATHANIEL PAINE.

ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES OF NORTH AMERICA. BY EDWARD E. HALE.

I WILL avail myself of the privilege of supplying the semiannual report of the Council, to present to the younger members of the Society a review of the work which this Society has done in the special department which involves the study of the aboriginal languages of North America. If I repeat some suggestions which I have ventured to make at the previous meetings, it must be that it seems desirable that such work of the Society now for nearly a century should be understood and a record of it made which can be easily referred to.

It is undoubtedly true that as our population advances and the histories of different states of America assert themselves with more vigor, the particular study of the aborigines fills a less important part in American history than it did when the American Antiquarian Society was founded. At that time Isaiah Thomas showed in more ways than one his interest in the native tribes and their history, and special reference is made to the study of those tribes in the papers which belong to the history of the birth of the Society. Our third Librarian, Mr. Baldwin, lost his life by an accident which occurred when he was on a visit in Ohio for the study of the Indian remains in that state then so young. The first volume of the Society's Transactions, published in 1820, reprints Father Hennepin's papers on La Salle's voyage, and makes extracts from other documents referring to studies among the native Indians of what was then still called the West. The principal papers are Mr. Caleb Atwater's and Dr. Mitchill's. True to the reputation thus acquired and to all the traditions

of the Society, the second volume of our Archæologia, published in 1836, is devoted almost entirely to Mr. Gallatin's treatise on the Indian tribes and their languages. An obituary notice of Mr. Baldwin, who had recently died, is the only paper in that volume which does not relate entirely to the natives of the country. It is fair to say that this report of our associate, Mr. Gallatin, made a distinct forward step in the pathway which had been opened by Mr. Du Ponceau about twenty years before.

There is a rather curious similarity between the lives of these two great men. Du Ponceau was a Frenchman who left his own country and became an American in that French enthusiasm for America which was typified in the life of Lafayette. He arrived in this country in 1777 and was on the staff of Steuben. Gallatin was a Swiss, and with the same enthusiasm arrived in Machias, Maine, on the fourteenth of July, 1780. Each of them became a citizen of America, and each of them is identified with the earliest philosophical study, excepting John Eliot's, of the languages of the natives. As early as 1819, in a paper of Du Ponceau read before our associates of the Philosophical Society, Du Ponceau discovered to the world for the first time the remarkable character of the aboriginal languages from Greenland to Cape Horn. That paper of his challenged the attention of the philologists of Europe, and gave an importance to the study of dialects. of different tribes and to languages absolutely distinct in their vocabulary from each other, which they had never seemed to deserve before. In the meanwhile, Mr. Gallatin, in the duty which he discharged as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, had taken advantage of that position to collect from different Indian agents and other officers of the government at the West, information with regard to the languages spoken in different parts of the country. When he retired from public office his tastes as a scholar and especially as a philologist

asserted themselves again, and he prepared his remarkable Synopsis of the Indian Tribes. The directors of our Society were glad to assume the publication of this treatise, and from that day to this, it has been the central textbook of students of aboriginal languages. In that synopsis he prints a large map of the United States, and for his purpose divides the native tribes among the Eskimaux, the Athapascas, the Algonquian-Lenape, the Iroquois, the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Choctas and Chicasas, the Sioux, the Black Feet, and the Pawnees,-a classification which has proved sufficiently convenient to maintain its place in discussions on the subject.

The settlement of California and Alaska has shown that neither he nor anyone else apprehended the great number of vocabularies in the American languages. A very curious paper on this subject, by Mr. Horatio Hale, has shown the existence of nearly fifty vocabularies entirely distinct from each other north of Guatemala. Gallatin, however, Du Ponceau, and the other early students knew well that while the grammar of the American languages is the same from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn, an entire divergence would be found in the vocabularies. For instance, not a single word of our New England language was intelligible to the Iroquois of New York, nor was one word of their language intelligible to our Narragansetts or Mohegans; and since this observation was made, it has thrown new light on the nomad excursions of Indian tribes and their establishment in regions quite dissimilar to their old homes. Our learned associate Mr. Bartlett, in 1860, found the Apaches of the arid region of western America speaking the language of Athapascas which Richardson had already studied on the Arctic Ocean.

The most interesting single observation, perhaps, brought forward by Mr. Gallatin, was his discovery to the world that the Algonquian language, of which one dialect was spoken in Massachusetts, ranged farther than any