

58 ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE UNITED STATES. 



From Pallas to the compilers of the " Mithridates" the transmission of the design 

 of the empress is direct. That great work, commenced by Professor John Christo- 

 pher Adelung, and continued by Professor Vater, the Hon. Frederic Adelung, and 

 Baron William Von Humboldt, was published at Berlin, gradually, from 1806 to 

 1817. Two volumes, containing together no less than eight hundred and seventy- 

 four pages, are exclusively dedicated to the languages of the Indians of North and 

 South America, and were written almost wholly by Professor Vater. 



We are, without question, indebted to the fruits of the labors of those learned 

 men, for the active proceedings of the Historical Committee of the American Phi- 

 losophical Society, in 1816. 



In that year, Mr. Duponceau commenced a correspondence with Mr. Hecke- 

 welder, the object of which was " to ascertain the structure and grammatical forms 

 of the languages of the aboriginal nations of America." 



To facilitate this investigation, the library of the society was enriched with a 

 collection of valuable MS. dictionaries, grammars, and vocabularies, prepared by 

 the Moravian missionaries, a series of vocabularies presented by Mr. Jefferson, and 

 various tables obtained from different quarters. Thus, in addition to the resources 

 provided by professor Vater, the society had become possessed of new materials of 

 an important character, with the advantage of having at hand an experienced 

 interpreter, able, from personal knowledge, or by correspondence with his brethren 

 at different missionary stations, to supply the most exact and pertinent information. 1 



The duty of the Historical Committee, begun by Dr. Wistar and Mr. Duponceau, 

 was continued by the latter alone, in consequence of Dr. Wistar's death ; and the 

 results were published in 1819, in connection with Mr. Heckewelder's "Historical 

 Account of the Indian Nations." Their report describes the peculiar characteristics 

 of the American languages, thus: " We find a new manner of compounding words 

 from various roots so as to strike the mind at once with a whole mass of ideas; a 

 new manner of expressing the cases of substantives by inflecting the verbs that 

 govern them; a new number (the particular plural), applied to the declension of 

 nouns and conjugation of verbs; a new concordance in tense of the conjunction 

 with the verb ; we see not only pronouns, as in the Hebrew and some other lan- 

 guages, but adjectives, conjunctions, adverbs, combined with the principal part of 

 speech, and producing an immense variety of verbal forms. When we consider 



from the Latin. We find pure Greek in the Peak (of Derbyshire) itself, whither foreigners can 

 scarcely be supposed to have come, there having been but few invitations to it twice ten centuries ago, 

 and perhaps not many now.' 



" In the work quoted from, an example of his method is given in the word ' beagles,' which he traces 

 from its Celtic root, pig, id est, little — through the Greek (rtvy^cu'os, t. e., a dwarf), the Irish (beg 

 aglach, i. e., little fearing, &c), the Scotch (philibig, i. e., a little petticoat), as well as in several 

 English provincialisms. Thus, beagle is not only a little dog, but also a cowslip, from the littleness of 

 its (lowers, and the appellation Peggy, is properly applicable to no female as a Christian name, but is 

 merely an epithet of size, and a word of endearment only." 



1 The Moravians had paid great attention to Indian lexicography. Zeisberger prepared a dictionary 

 and grammar of the Iroquois, and a copious vocabulary and grammar of the Delaware language ; Fyr- 

 leiis, a collection of Iroquois words and phrases, grammatically arranged ; and Schultz, a dictionary 

 and grammar of the Arnwack language. 



