To come back to our first proposition,--it is unquestionable that the Iroquois, when they framed the political system which exhibited this singular force of intellect and elevation of character, were a people of the Stone Age; and there is no good reason for supposing that they were superior in character and capacity to the people of the most primitive times. What we know of them entitles us to affirm that the makers of the earliest flint implements may have been equal, if not superior, in natural powers to the members of any existing race. And as language is the outgrowth and image of the mental faculties, it is not impossible, or even unlikely, that among the languages spoken by the people of those early ages, there may have been some as far superior in construction and power of expression to any tongue of modern Europe, as the languages of the barbarous Greeks and Germans, a thousand years before the Christian era, were superior to the speech of the highly civilized Egyptians. The conclusions to which these facts and reasonings point are of great scientific importance. As there could be no sound astronomy while the notion prevailed that the earth was the centre of the universe, and no science of history while each nation looked with contempt upon every other people, so we can hope for no complete and satisfying science of man and of human speech until our minds are disabused of those other delusions of self-esteem which would persuade us that superior culture implies superior capacity, and that the particular race and language which we happen to claim as our own are the best of all races and languages. [Printed at the SALEM PRESS, Nov., 1881.]