“When the position which Mr. S. has occupied for the last seventeen or more years is recollected, as well as his fitness and exertions to improve all its advantages, we shall at once see the benefit to the literary and scientific world which his researches in these various departments are likely to produce.  The subjects which have engaged his attention are regarded with deep interest by the philanthropist, the philologist, the archaeologist, as well as many other liberal inquirers, both in Europe and America, who, amid the scanty facts, cursory observations, and hurried, random conjectures of those who have been favored with a comparatively near view of them, have lamented the want of such deliberate investigations and comparative examinations, continued with sober judgment through a long series of years, as are now offered to the public.  We trust that a proper and enlightened patronage will warrant Mr. Schoolcraft in completing his design.  No man, possessing his qualifications, has enjoyed his advantages.  He has been able to take up, at his leisure, the scattered links of a broken chain, and fit them together.  A chaos of aboriginal facts will be reduced, under his hand, to some degree of order.

“Mr. Schoolcraft and Mr. Catlin have done more to preserve the fleeting traits of aboriginal character and history than all their predecessors in this field of inquiry, and none can follow them with the same success, as none can have the same range of subjects before them.  The scene is changing with each year, and the past, with respect to the Savages, does not recur.  They fall back with no hope to recover lost ground; they diminish with no hope to increase again; they degenerate with no hope to revive in physical or moral strength.  Those who have seen them most during the last few years, have seen them best.  After observers will find mere fragments, or a heterogeneous mass, in which all original identity is distorted or gone.

“The Tales now published must not be estimated for their intrinsic merit alone.  They may have less variety of construction, less beauty of imagination, less singularity of incident, than belong to oriental tales, the productions of more refined times, or more excitable people.  But the estimate must not be comparative.  They are to be regarded as the type of aboriginal mind, as the measure of intellectual power of our Sons of the Forest; as speaking their sentiments, their hopes and their fears, whatever they were or are, whether elevated or depressed, whether raising the race or sinking it in the scale of untutored nations.  Whether they prove a poverty of mental energy, a feebleness of imagination, a want of invention, or the reverse, cannot affect the value of these volumes in the opinion of those who look into them for evidences of the true character of the Indians.  Mr. Schoolcraft, or any other gentleman of taste and skill, might have formed out of these materials a series of Tales, highly