It will be seen that some of the so-called historical literature I have mentioned rests uncertain on the border line between fact and fancy. These old stories may be vague memories of past deeds, set in a frame of mythical details; or they may be ancient myths, solar or meteorological, which came to receive credence as actual occurrences. The task remains for special students of such matters to sift and analyze them, and settle this debateable point.
There is another class of narrations, about which there can be no doubt as to their purely imaginative origin. These are the animal myths, the fairy stories, the fireside tales of giants and magicians, with which the hours of leisure are whiled away. Several collections of these have been made, the words and phrases taken down precisely as the native story-teller delivered them, and thus they come strictly within the lines of aboriginal literature. They are the spontaneous outgrowth of the native mind, and are faithful examples of native speech.
Over a hundred such tales have been collected by Dr. Couto de Magalhaes, as narrated by the Tupis of Brazil, and many of them have been published with all desirable fidelity, and with a philosophical introduction and notes, in a volume issued by the Brazilian government, under his editorial care.[46]
A similar collection of Tupi stories was made by the late Prof. Charles F. Hartt, whose early death was a loss to more than one branch of science. It was his intention to edit them with the necessary notes and vocabularies; but, so far as I know, the only specimens which appeared in print were those he laid before the American Philological Association, in 1872.[47] The inquiries I have instituted about his MSS. have not been successful.
Numerous texts of this description have been obtained from the Klamath Indians by Mr. A.S. Gatschet, and from the Omaha by the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, both of which collections are in process of publication by the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington. Scattered specimens of stories of this kind have also been obtained by a number of travelers, and they are always a welcome aid to the study both of the psychology and language of a tribe.
The more civilized American tribes had made considerable advances in some of the natural sciences, and in none more than in practical astronomy. By close observation of the heavenly bodies they had elaborated a complicated and remarkably exact system of chronology. They had determined the length of the year with greater accuracy than the white invaders; and the different cycles by which they computed time allowed them to assign dates to occurrences many hundreds of years anterior.