But the conservative power of language is indisputable; and if the kinship now claimed for the polysynthetic languages of both hemispheres be correct, we are on the threshold of significant disclosures. The Huron-Iroquois tongue, in its numerous ramifications, as well as some of the native languages that have outlived the last of the races to which they belonged, may preserve traces of affinities as yet unrecognised. But in no respect are the Huron-Iroquois more correctly adducible as a typical race of American aborigines than in the absence of all evidence of their ever having acquired any of the arts upon which civilisation depends. We look in vain in their vocabularies for terms of science, or for names adapted to the arts and manufactures on which social progress depends. But they had developed a gift of oratory, for which their language amply sufficed, and from which we may infer the presence in this race of savages of latent powers, capable of wondrous development. “Their languages show, in their elaborate mechanism, as well as in their fulness of expression and grasp of thought, the evidence of the mental capacity of those who speak them. Scholars who admire the inflections of the Greek and Sanscrit verb, with their expressive force and clearness, will not be less impressed with the ingenious structure of the verb in Iroquois. It comprises nine tenses, three moods, the active and passive voices, and at least, twenty of those forms which in the Semitic grammars are styled conjugations. The very names of these forms will suffice to give evidence of the care and minuteness with which the framers of this remarkable language have endeavoured to express every shade of meaning. We have the diminutive and augmentative forms, the cis-locative and trans-locative, the duplicative, reiterative, motional, causative, progressive, attributive, frequentative, and many others.”[122] To speak, indeed, of the Iroquois as, in a consciously active sense, the framers of all this would be misleading. But it unquestionably grew up in the deliberations around the council fire, where the conflicting aims of confederate tribes were swayed by the eloquence of some commanding orator, until the fiercest warrior of this forest race learned to value more the successful wielding of the tongue in the _Kanonsionni_, or figurative Long House of the League, even than the wielding of the tomahawk in the field. At the organisation of the confederacy, the Canyengas or Mohawks were figuratively said to have “built a house,” _rodinonsonnih_, or rather to have “built the long house” in which the council fire of the Five Nations was kindled. Of this the Senecas, lying on the extreme west, were styled the “door-keepers,” and the Onondagas, whose territory was central, were the custodians. The whole usage is rhetorical and figurative. Under such influences the language of the Huron-Iroquois was framed, and it grew rich in emotional and persuasive forms.