e some collections for a study of a different character. Of
all the traits of a nation, the most decisive on its social life and
destiny is the estimate it places upon women,--that is, upon the
relation of the sexes. This is faithfully mirrored in language; and by
collecting and analyzing all words expressing the sexual relations, all
salutations of men to women and women to men, all peculiarities of the
diction of each, we can ascertain far more exactly than by any mere
description of usages what were the feelings which existed between them.
Did they know love as something else than lust? Were the pre-eminently
civilizing traits of the feminine nature recognized and allowed room for
action? These are crucial questions, and their answer is contained in
the spoken language of every tribe.

Nowhere, however, is an analytic scrutiny of words more essential than
in comparative mythology. It alone enables us to reach the meaning of
rites, the foundations of myths, the covert import of symbols. It is
useless for any one to write about the religion of an American tribe who
has not prepared himself by a study of its language, and acquainted
himself with the applications of linguistics to mythology. Very few have
taken this trouble, and the result is that all the current ideas on this
subject are entirely erroneous. We hear about a Good Spirit and a Bad
Spirit, about polytheism, fetichism, and animism, about sun worship and
serpent worship, and the like. No tribe worshipped a Good and a Bad
Spirit, and the other vague terms I have quoted do not at all express
the sentiment manifested in the native religious exercises. What this
was we can satisfactorily ascertain by analyzing the names applied to
their divinities, the epithets they use in their prayers and
invocations, and the primitive sense of words which have become obscured
by alterations of sounds.

A singular example of the last is presented by the tribes to whom I have
already referred as occupying this area,--the Algonkins. Wherever they
were met, whether far up in Canada, along the shores of Lake Superior,
on the banks of the Delaware, by the Virginia streams, or in the pine
woods of Maine, they always had a tale to tell of the Great Hare, the
wonderful Rabbit which in times long ago created the world, became the
father of the race, taught his children the arts of life and the chase,
and still lives somewhere far to the East where the sun rises. What
debasing animal wo