Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/231

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were published also, 1897-98, several other studies on the same subject. In these studies, new vocabularies and grammatical sketches were printed and much information of value presented, together with the author’s able discussion of its bearings; several new languages and linguistic stocks were also delimited. In 1885 Dr. Brinton exposed the “hoax of the Taensa Grammar and Dictionary” (Amer. Antiq., March, 1885), not the least of his services to the students of the future. Among the other linguistic works of the author deserving mention here are: “A Grammar [Byington’s] of the Choctaw Language” (Philadelphia, 1870, pp. 56); “A Grammar of the Cakchiquel Language” (Philadelphia, 1884, pp. 67); “A Lenâpé-English Dictionary” (Philadelphia, 1888, pp. 236). Dr. BRinton, who had served as a member of a committee appointed to examine into the scientific value of Volapük (Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc., Nov. 1889), discussed, in an address before the Nineteeh Century Club, New York, “The Aims and Traits of a World-Language” (Werner’s Voice Mag., 1889); and his “Essays of an Americanist” contains the revised form—“The Earliest Form of Human Speech, as Revealed by American Languages”—of a study of the language of primitive man, dating from about the same period. In “Science” (vol. x., 1887) he exposed some of the fallacies on record as to the “The Rate of Change in American Languages,” proving incorrect the common opinion that the change in unwritten tongues is much greater than in cultivated languages. Much of Dr. Brinton’s study in Central American languages was strengthened by his frequent visits to the great libraries of Europe, and his possession of many manuscripts and early writings of the Spanish chroniclers and missionaries, including later years a goodly portion of the collections of the late Dr. C. H. Berendt and the Abbé E. C. Brasseur de Bourbourg. All his manuscripts, pamphlets, and books, numbering in all some 20,000, he presented, a few months before his death, to the Library of the University of Pennsylvania. These, it is hoped, will continue to be used, and bear fruit in the spirit of Dr. Brinton’s eloquent appeal—“American Languages, and why we should study them” (Penn. Mag. of Hist. and Biogr., 1885)—for the scientific study and investigation of the aboriginal languages of the New World.

In 1884 Dr. Brinton became Professor of Ethnology and Archæology in the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, and in 1886 Professor of American Linguistics and Archæology in the University of Pennsylvania. Needless to say, his lectures were always suggestive and inspiring, and many of them have appeared in printed form, from time to time, either as separate essays or as portions of more ambitious volumes. In 1892 Dr. Brinton acted as examiner in Anthropology at Clark University, Worcester, Mass.,