So far as this comment is directed to depreciate the {12} value of Sproat’s estimate of the mental powers of the Nootkas, I cannot think that Professor Boas has been quite fair to the writer. Sproat was no passing traveller, speaking to the natives in a foreign language, and jotting down superficial impressions derived from hasty observation. He had “lived among them and had a long acquaintanceship with them.” He was a settler, and for five years a colonial magistrate in constant contact with several of their tribes. His own account of his method of collecting information and the substance of his book are conclusive as to his painstaking researches; and Professor Boas himself elsewhere bears testimony to his trustworthiness.[12.1] Moreover, a comparison of the quotations renders it clear that on the whole they confirm one another. Probably, however, Professor Boas’ criticism is intended to apply not so much to Sproat’s statements as to the use made of them by Herbert Spencer and other theorists. It comes to this, therefore, that the Nootka’s mental capacity is considerable, his mind is alert and active on subjects that interest him, but that he is not interested in many of those on which an anthropologist desires to learn, and hence he speedily becomes “bored” and answers at random. The horizon of savage interests among the neighbouring Dene or Ten’a of the Yukon Valley is thus defined by an experienced missionary: “The activity of their minds is commonly confined within a narrow circle, as is evidenced by their favourite subjects of conversation. Food, hunting and fishing, with their attendant circumstances, family happenings, health and disease, devils and their actions, sexual propensities--such are the topics which practically sum up the encyclopædia of their conversation.” “The {13} Ten’a mind,” he says in another place, “is anything but speculative, and its imaginative powers have not been turned to building theories of its belief, but rather to excogitate a variety of ways whereby this belief perseveringly asserts itself.” The native’s “dogmas are very nebulous and undefined, and he has never heard them explicitly formulated, nor even attempted to state them distinctly to himself.” Consequently, “whereas there is a certain uniformity in the practices, and an overabundance of them, there are very few points of belief common to several individuals, and these are of the vaguest kind.”[13.1]