expression for which languages of that type are noted. The
best-qualified judges have been the most struck with this peculiar
excellence. "The variety of compounds," wrote the accomplished
missionary, Brebeuf, concerning the Huron tongue, "is very great; it is
the key to the secret of their language. They have as many genders as
ourselves, as many numbers as the Greeks." Recurring to the same
comparison, he remarks of the Huron verb that it has as many tenses and
numbers as the Greek, with certain discriminations which the latter did
not possess. [Footnote: _Relation_ of 1636, pp 99,100.] A great
living authority has added the weight of his name to these opinions of
the scholarly Jesuit. Professor Max Muller, who took the opportunity
afforded by the presence of a Mohawk undergraduate at Oxford to study
his language, writes of it in emphatic terms: "To my mind the structure
of such a language as the Mohawk is quite sufficient evidence that those
who worked out such a work of art were powerful reasoners and accurate
classifiers." [Footnote: In a letter to the author, dated Feb. 14,
1882. In a subsequent letter Prof. Muller writes, in regard to the study
of the aboriginal languages of this continent: "It has long been a
puzzle to me why this most tempting and promising field of philological
research has been allowed to lie almost fallow in America,--as if these
languages could not tell us quite as much of the growth of the human
mind as Chinese, or Hebrew, or Sanscrit." I have Prof. Max Miller's
permission to publish these extracts, and gladly do so, in the hope that
they may serve to stimulate that growing interest which the efforts of
scholars like Trumbull, Shea, Cuoq, Brinton, and, more recently, Major
Powell and his able collaborators of the Ethnological Bureau, are at
length beginning to awaken among us, in the investigation of this
important and almost unexplored province of linguistic science.]

It is a fact somewhat surprising, as well as unfortunate, that no