Editor’s Preface.

“ Wora’s paint humanity in its thoughts, longings, aspirations, struggles, failures —paint it upon a canvas of breath in the colours of lz'fe.”—ANONYMOUS.

SOMEONE has said that the most difficult problem now facing

civilization is the proper treatment of the lower races. Let us assume, as we all do, without argument, that our forefathers were superior to the races they found in America a few hundred years ago, and that acknowledgment forces us, if we be true men, to obey the stentorian command of Kipling when he orders us to take up the White Man’s Burden. We must smother them or mother them, and we do well to learn something of their national traits, before we lift a hand to punish or befriend, for in either case, whatever our motive may be, we lift our hand with peril to ourselves as well as them.

It is true they have preserved no records for such study, yet their past is not wholly forgotten or lost, for in the mythology and language of a people the careful student now may read, in simple terms their history. Let us acknowledge our indebtedness to Silas Tertius Rand, the Micmac Missionary, whose contributions to phil- ology and ethnology easily give him a place amongst our foremost men, a place fittingly acknowledged in his later years by three Canadian Colleges conferring upon him the Degrees D.D., LL.D., and D.C.L. It was he who translated and preserved the Legends of the Micmacs, afterwards published by Professor Horsford for Welles- ley, and it was he, too, who as he went about his work gathered the almost interminable word-lists which are at last, though somewhat diffidently, presented to the public in Dictionary form.

From his earliest opportunities Rand had found keen delight in language-study; to him it was always a recreation, never a task; and it is told on good authority that when at his best he could con-