ity of the fertile and rapidly improving district through which it passes." Mr. Hale was an honorary or corresponding member of many learned societies, including, besides those mentioned in the foregoing sketch, the Anthropological Societies of Washington and Vienna, the Polynesian Society of Wellington, New Zealand, the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, the New England Historico-Genealogical Society, and several others.
A few days before his death Mr. Hale was notified by the Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the Council of that body desired him to act as vice-president of the Section of Anthropology at the next meeting, at Toronto in 1897. The letter declining to accept this position, on account of failing health, was one of the last from his pen.
[Mr. Hale's first scientific publication was the first systematic contribution to the study of the Malaisian and Polynesian languages, and cast a flood of light on the subject at the outset. His last published contribution presented evidences that the native tribes of America possessed at the time of the discovery a higher degree of civilization than any one had before ascribed to them, evincing "intellectual and moral faculties of no mean order"; that they had established forms of government, a real money, "the elements of a written language, widely diffused, and employed especially in preserving, with happy effect, the memory of treaties of peace and alliance"; and a very high degree of generally diffused comfort. In preparing this paper for publication in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, for February, 1897, Mr. E. B, Tylor mentions having received, while writing, the intelligence of Mr. Hale's death with regret, but hardly with surprise, and adds: "The tone of his letters for months past had been that of a man looking toward the end of his work in life, and anxious to settle finally all matters he had much at heart. Among these were his investigations into the history of his friends the Iroquois and Hurons, to which he had given so much labor, and of which his last studies, undertaken to elucidate their native records, form a fit completion." At the conclusion of his tribute to Mr. Hale in The Critic, Dr. Franz Boas says: "His wise counsel, his amiable guidance, his kindly friendship, insure a grateful memory to him whose works students of ethnology and of linguistics will admire for all time to come. Science has lost a worker to whose enthusiasm and faithful labor we owe much; mankind has lost a man whose wisdom, kindness, and steadfastness it is hard to lack."]
