Of all the Amerind languages of North America, that of the Eskimo is probably the most homogeneous. Its dialects are alike from one side of the continent to the other, following similarity in other respects. Dall states there is a saying “that a man understanding thoroughly the dialect of either extreme, could pass from village to village, from Greenland to Labrador, from Labrador to Bering Strait, and thence southward to the Copper River, staying five days in each halting place, and that in all that journey he would encounter no greater differences of speech and customs than he could master in the few days devoted to each settlement. Probably there is no other race in the world distributed over an equal territory, which exhibits such solidarity.” They do not take to new languages. Though the Eskimo of Alaska have had long intercourse with English-speaking men, their English is very limited. Like most of the Amerinds, they prefer to invent their own terms for articles that are new to them. The Aleutian Islanders are of Eskimo stock, but their language is different from the main body of the family, and would not be understood by them. The writings of the Cherokees in the syllabary of Sequoyah are of sacred formulas. These were written out by the shamans and are thoroughly Amerind. “They are not disjointed fragments,” says Mooney, who made a careful study of the subject, “of a system long since extinct, but are the revelation of a living faith which still has its priests and devoted adherents.” The language used is full of archaic forms and figurative expressions, some of which even the shamans cannot now understand. Some of these are highly poetical, especially the prayers “used to win the love of a woman or to destroy the life of an enemy, in which we find such expressions as: ‘Now your soul fades away—your spirit shall grow less and dwindle away never to reappear.’ ‘Let her be completely veiled in loneliness,—O Black Spider, may you hold her soul in your web, so that it may never get through the meshes!’ ‘Your soul has come into the very centre of my soul, never to turn away.’”[35] [Illustration: PETROGLYPHS NEAR WRANGELL, ALASKA, PROBABLY TLINKIT] In nearly all the Amerind languages there was a poetical touch. But what seems to be poetry to us arose partly from the inability of the Amerind to express himself in a spiritual way. As his religion was chiefly zoötheistic, and the heavenly bodies and natural forces were personified as animals, his comparisons and references were not intended for metaphor, but were merely the ordinary workings of his mind on the material at his command. NOTE