sents the object as it appears or is fancied to appear, and
not as it is _thought_. Furthermore, the constant learning by heart
infallibly leads to slavish repetition and mental servility.

A symbol when understood is independent of language, and is as
universally current as an Arabic numeral. But this divorce of spoken and
written language is of questionable advantage. It at once destroys all
permanent improvement in a tongue through elegance of style, sonorous
periods, or delicacy of expression, and the life of the language itself
is weakened when its forms are left to fluctuate uncontrolled. Written
poetry, grammar, rhetoric, all are impossible to the student who draws
his knowledge from such a source.

Finally, it has been justly observed by the younger Humboldt that the
painful fidelity to the antique figures transmitted from barbarous to
polished generations is injurious to the aesthetic sense, and dulls the
mind to the beautiful in art and nature.

The transmission of thought by figures and symbols would, on the whole,
therefore, foster those narrow and material tendencies which the genius
of polysynthetic languages would seem calculated to produce. Its one
redeeming trait of strengthening the memory will serve to explain the
strange tenacity with which certain myths have been preserved through
widely dispersed families, as we shall hereafter see.

Besides this of language there are two traits in the history of the red
man without parallel in that of any other variety of our species which
has achieved any notable progress in civilization.

The one is his _isolation_. Cut off time out of mind from the rest of
the world, he never underwent those crossings of blood and culture which
so modified and on the whole promoted the growth of the old world
nationalities. In his own way he worked out his own destiny, and what he
won was his with a more than ordinary right of ownership. For all those
old dreams of the advent of the Ten Lost Tribes, of Buddhist priests, of
Welsh princes, or of Phenician merchants on American soil, and there
exerting a permanent influence, have been consigned to the dustbin by
every unbiased student, and when we see such men as Mr. Schoolcraft and
the Abbe E. C. Brasseur essaying to resuscitate them, we regretfully
look upon it in the light of a literary anachronism.

The second trait is the entire absence of the herdsman's life with its
softening associations. Throughout the continent ther