Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/180

(1626), how, when the Indians buried kettles and furs with the dead, the bodies of these things remained, but the souls of them went to the dead men who used them. So Father Le Jeune describes the souls, not only of men and animals, but of hatchets and kettles, crossing the water to the Great Village out in the sunset. The genuineness of this idea of object-souls is proved by other independent explorers finding them elsewhere in the world. Two of the accounts most closely tallying with the American come from the Rev. Dr. Mason, in Burmah, and the Rev. J. Williams, in Feejee. That is to say, the most characteristic development of early animism belongs to the same region as the most characteristic development of matriarchal society, extending from Southeast Asia into Melanesia and Polynesia, and North and South America. Every one who studies the history of human thought must see the value of such facts as these, and the importance of gathering them up among the rude tribes who preserve them, before they pass into a new stage of culture. All who have read Mr. Hale's studies on the Hiawatha legend and other Indian folk-lore must admit that the native traditions, with their fragments of real history, and their incidental touches of native religion, ought never to be left to die out unrecorded. In the Dominion, especially in its outlying districts toward the Arctic region and over the Rocky Mountains, there is an enormous mass of anthropological material of high value to be collected; but this collection must be done within the next generation, or there will be little left to collect. The small group of Canadian anthropologists, able and energetic as they are, can manage and control this work, but can not do it all themselves. What is wanted is a Canadian Anthropological Society with a stronger organization than yet exists, able to arrange explorations in promising districts, to circulate questions and requirements among the proper people in the proper places, and to lay a new burden on the shoulders of the already hard worked professional men, and other educated settlers through the newly opened country, by making them investigators of local anthropology. The Canadian Government, which has well deserved the high reputation it holds throughout the world for wisdom and liberality in dealing with the native tribes, may reasonably be asked to support more thorough exploration, and collection and publication of the results, in friendly rivalry with the United States Government, which has in this way fully acknowledged the obligation of making the colonization of new lands not only promotive of national wealth, but serviceable to science. It is not for me to do more here, and now, than to suggest practical steps toward this end. My laying before the section so diffusive a sketch of the problems of anthropology, as they present themselves in the Dominion, has been with the underlying intention of calling public notice to the important scientific work now standing ready to Canadian hands; the undertaking of which, it is to be hoped, will be one outcome of this visit of the British Association to Montreal.