Caldwell sat in his door at the cool of the day and breathed the wonderfully bracing mountain air; and great marches of mountain and valley spread out before him." I lay down my pen with a feeling that I have not done justice to my subject, and with a regret that the work had not been wrought by an abler hand. I trust, however, and believe, that the simple facts I have related will be found to carry the highest eulogy in themselves, and fully justify all I have written. DR. EDWIN JAMES. BY L. H. PAMMEL, PH. D., Professor of Botany, Iowa State College, Ames. Doctor James was considered excellent authority upon all matters relating to the American Indians, and Mr. Bancroft, in preparing his History of the United States, relied greatly upon the articles by him which appeared from time to time in various periodicals. In the twentieth edition of the history, acknowledgment, in the form of marginal notes, is made of this debt. An article published in the Philadelphia Transcript, for instance, was the source of the following in Bancroft: Materialism contributed greatly to the picturesque brilliancy of American discourse. Prosperity is as a bright sun or a cloudless sky; to establish peace, is to plant a forest tree, or to bury a tomahawk; to offer presents as a consolation to mourners, is to cover the grave of the departed; and if the Indian from the prairies would speak of griefs and hardships it is the thorns of the prickly pear that penetrate his moccasins. Especially the style of the Six Nations was adorned with noble metaphors, and glowed with allegory.* The grammatical formation of the Indian languages differs greatly from that of English. In an article in the American Quarterly Review, Doctor James speaks of the difficulties encountered in arranging the paradigm of a Chippewa verb. Bancroft draws largely from this paper in the following, * Bancroft's Hist. of the U. S., vol. 3, p. 257. which we quote in order that we may estimate more clearly the task which Doctor James had undertaken : There are in the American dialects no genuine declensions: it is otherwise with conjugations. The verbs have true grammatical forms, as fixed and as regular as those of Greek or Sanscrit. The relations of number and person, both with regard to the agent and the object, are included in the verb by means of significant pronominal syllables, which are prefixed, inserted or annexed. The relations of time are expressed by the insertion, in part, of unmeaning, in part, it may be, of significant syllables; and, as many supplementary syllables may not always be easily piled one upon another, changes of vowels, and elisions, take place; and sometimes, also, unmeaning syllables are inserted for the sake of euphony. Inflection, agglutination and euphonic changes, all take place in the conjugation of the Chippewa verb. Of varieties of terminations and form the oldest languages and those of the earliest stage of development, have the most. But not only does the Algonquin verb admit the number of forms required for the diversity of time and mode; it has also numerous conjugations. An action may be often repeated and a frequentative conjugation follows. The idea of causation, which the Indian does not conceive abstractly, and can express only synthetically, makes a demand, as in the Hebrew, for a new conjugation. Every verb may be used negatively, as well as positively; it may include in itself an animate object, or the object may be inanimate; and whether it expresses a simple action, or, again, is a frequentative, it may have a reflex signification, like the middle voice of a Greek verb; and every one of these accidents gives rise to an entire series of new forms. Then since the Indian verb includes within itself the agent and the object, it may pass through as many transitions as the persons and numbers of the pronouns will admit of different combinations; and each of these combinations may be used positively or negatively, with a reflex or causative signification. In this manner, changes are so multiplied, that the number of possible forms of a Chippewa verb is said to amount to five or six thousand; in other words, the number of possible variations is indefinite. Such are the cumbersome processes by which a synthetical language expresses thought. For the want of analysis, the savage obtains no mastery over the forms of his language; nay the forms themselves are used in a manner which to us would seem anomalous, and to the Indian can appear regular only because his mind receives the complex thought without analysis. To a verb having a nominative singular and an accusative plural, a plural termination is often affixed.* In his description of the manners, political institutions and religious faith of the Indians, Bancroft, using Doctor James' * Bancroft's Hist. of the U. S., vol. 3, p. 261. article on Tanner as the source of his material, writes as follows: The hunting tribes have the affections of men; but among them also, extremity of want produces like results. The aged and infirm meet with little tenderness; the hunters as they roam the wilderness, desert their old men; if provisions fail, the feeble drop down, and are lost, or life is shortened by a blow.* * * * Solemn rites precede the departure of the warriors; the war-dance must be danced and the war-song sung. They express in their melodies a contempt of death, a passion for glory; and the chief boasts that "the spirits on high shall repeat his name. And with the pride which ever marks the barbarian, each one adds, "If any man thinks himself a great warrior I think myself the same."'+ * * * The woods, the wilds, and the waters, respond to savage intelligence; the stars and the mountains live; the river, and the lake, and the waves, have a spirit. Every hidden agency, every mysterious instance, is personified. A god dwells in the sun, and in the moon, and in the firmament; the spirit of the morning reddens in the eastern sky; a deity is present in the ocean and in the fire; the crag that overhangs the river has its genius. These excerpts from Bancroft indicate clearly the reputation that Doctor James had established as a close observer and reliable authority in regard to all pertaining to Indian life. CHANGE OF LOCATION AND MORE ABOUT THE CHOLERA. In those days as now, it was necessary for appointments in the army to come from Washington. Doctor James wanted to be stationed in the east, and the following letters have to do with this desired change: My Dear Brother: Annapolis, Aug. 4th, 1832. Yours of July 27th gave me great satisfaction. We have felt the deepest anxiety for you, knowing that you must be called to very severe trials whilst the pestilence is at work in your city and in the midst of your friends and associates. We rejoice to hear that in your own case it has been mild, and we infer that our other relatives have escaped it altogether. I hope you will soon find yourself so much at leisure that you can favor me with farther hints of practice as I cannot and do not expect that we shall be exempted altogether from its visitations at this place. You will probably have observed that it has broken out with Bancroft's Hist. of the U. S., vol. 3, p. 273. Ib., vol. 3, p. 281. Ib., vol. 3, p. 286. |