of aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft's procedure, in other words,
amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystification; and unfortunately he has
had not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologists
and students of the evolution of love.

It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable opportunities
for ethnological research, should not have added a critical attitude
and a habit of accuracy to his great industry. The historian Parkman,
a model observer and scholar, described Schoolcraft's volumes on the
Indian Tribes of the United States as

"a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with
blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page
of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific
inquiry."[199]

REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE

A few of the tales I have cited are not marred by superadded
sentimental adornments, but all of them are open to suspicion from
still another point of view. They are invariably so proper and pure
that they might be read to Sunday-school classes. Since one-half of
Schoolcraft's assistants in the compilation of this material were
women, this might have been expected, and if the collection had been
issued as a Fairy Book it would have been a matter of course. But they
were issued as accurate "oral legends" of wild Indians, and from the
point of view of the student of the history of love the most important
question to ask was, "Are Indian stories in reality as pure and
refined in tone as these specimens would lead us to suspect?" I will
answer that question by citing the words of one of the warmest
champions of the Indians, the eminent American anthropologist,
Professor D.G. Brinton _(M.N.W., 160):

"Anyone who has listened to Indian tales, not as they
are recorded in books, but as they are told by the
camp-fire, will bear witness to the abounding obscenity
they deal in. That the same vulgarity shows itself in
their arts and life, no genuine observer need doubt."

And in a footnote he gives this extremely interesting information:

"The late George Gibbs will be acknowledged as an
authority here. He was at the time of his death
preparing a Latin translation of the tales he had
collected, as they were too erotic to print in English.
He wrote me, 'Schoolcraft's legends are emasculated to
a degree that they become no longer Indian.'"

No longer Indian, indeed! And these doctored