ing; how it also gives rise to words expressing similarity
and identity; how it means to be foremost, to stand ahead of others; and
finally, how it signifies to come to me, to unify or congregate
together. But doubtless I have trespassed on your ears long enough with
unfamiliar words.

Such suggestions as these will give you some idea of the value of
American languages to American ethnology. But I should be doing
injustice to my subject were I to confine my arguments in favor of their
study to this horizon. If they are essential to a comprehension of the
red race, not less so are they to the science of linguistics in general.
This science deals not with languages, but with _language_. It looks at
the idiom of a nation, not as a dry catalogue of words and grammatical
rules, but as the living expression of the thinking power of man, as the
highest manifestation of that spiritual energy which has lifted him from
the level of the brute, the complete definition of which, in its origin
and evolution, is the loftiest aim of universal history. As the
intention of all speech is the expression of thought, and as the final
purpose of all thinking is the discovery of truth, so the ideal of
language, the point toward which it strives, is the absolute form for
the realization of intellectual function.

In this high quest no tongue can be overlooked, none can be left out of
account. One is just as important as another. Goethe once said that he
who knows but one language knows none; we may extend the apothegm, and
say that so long as there is a single language on the globe not
understood and analyzed, the science of language will be incomplete and
illusory. It has often proved the case that the investigation of a
single, narrow, obscure dialect has changed the most important theories
of history. What has done more than anything else to overthrow, or, at
least, seriously to shake, the time-honored notion that the White Race
first came from Central Asia? It was the study of the Lithuanian dialect
on the Baltic Sea, a language of peasants, without literature or
culture, but which displays forms more archaic than the Sanscrit. What
has led to a complete change of views as to the prehistoric population
of Southern Europe? The study of the Basque, a language unknown out of a
few secluded valleys in the Pyrenees.

There are many reasons why unwritten languages, like those of America,
are more interesting, more promising in results, to the s