Language, pursuits, habits, geographical position, and those
subtle mental traits which make up the characteristics of races and
nations, all tend to deflect from a given standard the religious life of
the individual and the mass. It is essential to give these due weight,
and a necessary preface therefore to an analysis of the myths of the red
race is an enumeration of its peculiarities, and of its chief families
as they were located when first known to the historian.
Of all such modifying circumstances none has greater importance than the
means of expressing and transmitting intellectual action. The spoken and
the written language of a nation reveal to us its prevailing, and to a
certain degree its unavoidable mode of thought. Here the red race offers
a striking phenomenon. There is no other trait that binds together its
scattered clans, and brands them as members of one great family, so
unmistakably as this of language. From the Frozen Ocean to the Land of
Fire, without a single exception, the native dialects, though varying
infinitely in words, are marked by a peculiarity in construction which
is found nowhere else on the globe,[6-1] and which is so foreign to the
genius of _our_ tongue that it is no easy matter to explain it.
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