INTRODUCTION xi

and customs, in which he manifested his grow- ing admiration for their intelligence and char- acter.

Dr. Rand’s wide knowledge of many lan- guages naturally led him to a close study of the language of the Micmacs; and his opinion must be accepted as of the highest value. In- stead of finding this language poor and limited, as he had expected, he soon discovered it to be quite the reverse, remarkably flexible and ex- pressive. “In declension of nouns, and in con- jugation of verbs it is as regular as the Greek, and twenty times as copious!” he exclaims; and to a profound student of Greek this must indeed have excited wonder and admiration, for in that day much less was known than now about the languages of primitive peoples. It is not surprising that he was astonished when he found that a single verb of this language, if given in all its modifications, would fill a vol- ume; that there were indicative, imperative, subjunctive, potential, and infinitive moods, and in the indicative the forms of eleven tenses; that there were active, passive and middle Voices, and great flexibility in compounding words, as in the German and Greek; that al- most any word in the Micmac could take on the verbal form, and then could be inflected throughout all moods and tenses—for it was quite natural then for a scholar to suppose that