exact, and in good working order, must be prodigious.” This tendency to elaborate niceties of discrimination is in striking contrast to that of the modern cultivated languages of Europe; and it is not without reason that it is spoken of as a “complicated intellectual machine.” The contrast, for example, between the Mohawk or other Iroquois verb, in all its complex variations, and the extreme simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon verb, with only its Indefinite and Perfect Tenses,—the former predicated either of the present, or of a future time, and the latter of any past time,—can scarcely fail to impress the thoughtful student who keeps in view the relative civilisation of the Iroquois, and of the English people at the period when Anglo-Saxon in its purely inflectional stage was still the national language. The English verb has since then acquired wonderful power and compass by means of the auxiliary verbs; but its whole tendency is at variance with the elaborations in number and gender of the Iroquois verb. These are only partially illustrated in the above example, and might easily have been carried further. For example, the rendering of the Active, Indicative, Past Progressive, with Feminine Object is really a verb in the passive voice. To realise the full inflectional niceties of such minute grammatical distinctions, the two genders should be given; and also a mixed gender, _i.e._ the two genders together, as the artists may consist of both sexes. This is indicated in the two forms of the Future Indefinite, by _eas’hakodiyadarahste_, “they (mas.) shall draw her,” _eayaktodiyadarahste_, “they (fem.) shall draw her.” But a study of the paradigm of the Mohawk verb will be found to illustrate in a variety of interesting aspects the process of unpremeditated grammatical evolution among an unlettered people, with whom the influence of oratory in the councils of the tribe was one of their most powerful resources as a preliminary to war.