NO. I
��REVIEWS
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��to specialist researches of a more traditional color, men who shrink from the serious study of languages spoken by mere Indians with the same amusing helplessness that the conventional classicist seems to betray when he gets a whiff of modern ethnological method. The Bureau could not pick and choose, it had to avail itself of the services of such enthusi- asts as could be found. In the second place, the languages studied by the Bureau were in most cases a veritable terra incognita when first handled by its investigators. It was not, as had already come to be the case among the Semitists and Indogermanists, a question of refined morphologic analyses and of subtle phonetic determinations. The problems were rougher and more fundamental, in many ways all the more fascinating on that account. The vast number of aboriginal American languages had to be roughly compared with one another, and grouped into at least temporarily exclu- sive "stocks;" the phonetic systems, vocabu- laries, and structures of these languages had to be painfully worked out point by point; the oral literature of the Indians had to be slowly recorded in the form of texts which might serve as a bona fide basis for the gram- matical superstructures built out of the raw materials of field-work. The subject of North American linguistics was, when Powell first took the work in hand, a tangled thicket with few discernible trails; now, chiefly through the labors of the Bureau itself, trails have been blazed all through the thicket, and, though there are still many clumps of virgin forest, most of the trees have been felled, and a good part of the land turned over to agri- cultural uses. Finally, there is a third con- sideration, in part already anticipated, that makes any direct comparison of American Indian linguistic work with that of, say, most Indogermanic philologists highly mis- leading. The latter deals chiefly with written records whose accuracy is beyond personal control, the former includes and is further based on field-records for whose accuracy the
��Americanist is himself responsible. There is therefore no use contrasting the breathless finesse of a German Lautschieber with the relatively rough-and-ready carrying-on of the majority of Indian linguists. One can be sword-maker and swordsman too, but is not likely to be equally clever at both jobs. Anyway, most of us have a shrewd suspicion that many a renowned denizen of the German universities, impressive in his balancing of imponderable phonologic nuances, would find himself sadly up a tree when confronted with the live problems of an intricate Indian lan- guage that he was forced to study by pure induction. In spite of the difficulties that we have mentioned, the general level of quality in the linguistic publications of the Bureau must be admitted to be high.
The corner-stone of the linguistic edifice in aboriginal North America, one might almost say of North American anthropology gener- ally, is Powell's "Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico" (No. 60 of the bibliography). Though the work generally passes under Powell's name, it is of course a compilation based on the labors of several members of the Bureau staff. This monu- mental work, with its appended map, has served, and on the whole still serves, as the basis of all classificatory work in North American linguistics, secondarily (and less justly) in ethnology as well. Despite its inevitable errors of detail, it has proved itself to be an eminently reliable guide. The lines of linguistic cleavage laid down in it still have a fundamental significance, though the inter- pretation of these lines of cleavage has been somewhat modified by recent research. There can now be no reasonable doubt that the "stocks" of Powell's linguistic map are not all to be taken in the mutually exclusive sense in which he defined them. New syntheses are forced upon us by further investigation, the terrifying complexity dis- closed on Powell's map progressively yielding to simplification. On the basis of evidence
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