A similar inconsistency in the use of terms has no doubt been the cause of the conflicting reports on the traditional poetry of the Greenlanders. In his account of their “Wissenschaften” Cranz says that they have no heroic songs describing the doings of their ancestors. But the very wording of this negation—“They know nothing about them except that they were brave hunters, and slew the old Norsemen”—shows that it can by no means be adduced to prove complete default of oral tradition.[213] And in another passage Cranz expressly says that the Eskimos, at their sunfeasts, praise the feats of their ancestors.[214] It is more difficult to bring into accord the various statements concerning the Melanesians. Mr. Codrington sees a distinguishing feature of this ethnological group in the fact that they, in contrast to the Polynesians, are conspicuously devoid of native history and oral tradition.[215] But this rule is evidently subject to at least one important exception, as the Fijians are known to celebrate subjects from their legendary history in their choral dance-songs.[216] One is led to believe, therefore, that in some other island, also of the Melanesian group, traditional poetry and traditional dramas may have existed, but escaped the attention of the ethnologists. Negative statements are never to be unreservedly relied upon, least of all perhaps in accounts of uncivilised men. The case of the Navajo affords an instructive and warning example, which falls exactly within the limits of the present investigation. In spite of the statement by Dr. Letherman, who is acknowledged to have been a “man of unusual ability,” that the Navajos had “no knowledge of their origin or of the history of their tribe,”[217] Dr. Washington Matthews has been able to gather his imposing collection of historical songs and traditional commemorative customs.[218] An incident of this kind is apt to make us sceptical with regard to the assertion of Captain Cook, which has, however, been unreservedly quoted by Lubbock and Spencer, that the Maoris, a race noted for old legends and ancient lore, in 1770 had no recollection of Tasman’s visit to their island.[219] And one is inclined to doubt the trustworthiness of Schoolcraft’s informant when he says that the Appalachian Indians had lost all recollection of De Soto’s expedition.[220] Compared with the statements concerning the Lenape and the Mohicans, who still remember Hudson, and the Iroquois and the Algonquins, who preserve traditions of the first white immigrants,[221] this assertion will, in any case, lose its force as a judgment upon the whole North American race, in which sense it has, however, been used by Lubbock.[222] On a closer investigation the Chinooks will perhaps be also discharged from the unfavourable verdict passed upon them by Kane, who could never hear any traditions as to their former origin.[223]