Mr. Hale has shown that the language of the Cherokees has a grammar mainly Huron-Iroquois, and a vocabulary largely recruited from some foreign source. From this he infers that one portion of the conquered Alligéwi, while the conflict still lasted, may have cast in their lot with the conquering race, just as the Tlascalans did with the Spaniards in their war against the Aztecs, and hence the origin of the great Cherokee nation. The fugitive Alligéwi, he surmises, may have fled down the Mississippi till they reached the country of the Choctaws, themselves a mound-building people; and to the alliance of the two he would thus trace the difference in the language of the latter from that of their eastern kindred, the Creeks or Muskhogees.[143] On the assumption of such a combination of ethnical elements, the origin of the Creek confederacy is easily accounted for. It is to this same element of language that we have to revert for guidance in the interpretation of the history of this remarkable race. It would be an evasion of the most essential evidence on which any reliable conclusions must be based, if the fact were overlooked that the Iroquois never emerged beyond the primitive stage of the Stone period. Nevertheless in one element of intellectual development their progress had been great. Each nation of the Iroquois league had its chief, to whom pertained the right of kindling the symbolic council-fire, and of taking the lead in all public assemblies. When the representative chiefs of the nations gathered in the Long House around the common council-fire of the league, it was no less necessary that they should be able and persuasive speakers than brave warriors. Rhetoric was cultivated in the council-house of the Iroquois no less earnestly than in the Athenian ekklesia or the Roman forum. Acute reasoning and persuasive eloquence demanded all the discriminating refinements of grammar, and the choice of terms which an ample vocabulary supplies. The holophrastic element has been noted as a peculiar characteristic of American languages. The word-sentences thus constructed not only admitted of, but encouraged, an elaborate nicety of discrimination; while the marked tendency of the process, so far as the language itself is concerned, was to absorb all other parts in the verb. Time, place, manner, aim, purpose, degree, and all the other modifications of language are combined polysynthetically with the root. Nouns are to a large extent verbal forms; and not only nouns and adjectives, but adverbs and prepositions, are regularly conjugated. Elaborated polysyllables, flexibly modified by systematic internal changes, give expression, in one compounded word-sentence, to every varying phase of intricate reasoning or emotion; and the complex structure shows the growth of a language in habitual use for higher purposes than the mere daily wants of life. The vocabulary in use in some rural districts in England has been found to include less than