6 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
no aspiration expressed by this letter in English is found in the Ojibway 
language.” 
Here then we have clearly set forth the scientific principles upon 
which his work proceeded. It took years of “attentive investigation” 
to satisfy him that he had included all the elemental sounds of the 
language. These he compared with the analogous English sounds on 
the basis of “the position of the organs” of speech in their formation, 
and found that of the eight consonants six were essentially different. 
Yet he chose Roman letters to represent these six elements of speech. 
The reason of this may be inferred from a letter written to the Rev. 
Joseph Stinson, dated June 11th, 1841, “ For this purpose I prepared a 
syllabic alphabet such as I presented ‘to the Bible Society in Toronto 
in 1836, (and of which they disapproved).’’ From this brief note we 
learn that as early as 1836, he had not only analyzed with scientific 
skill the Ojibway branch of the Algonquin family of languages and 
reduced it to an alphabet of eight consonants and four vowels, but also 
discovered the secret of its simple syllabic character, and the possibility 
of writing it by syllabic rather than by alphabetic characters. It 
seems also to be evident from this that he had already invented that 
which perhaps more than anything else has contributed to the success 
of his work; viz., the writing of the entire syllabary of the language 
by nine characters in four positions. The four positions represented his 
four vowel sounds in open syllables. One of his nine characters repre- 
sented in its four positions, the four vowels with light breathing, or as 
constituting in themselves each a syllable. The other eight represented 
the consonants as combined with the vowels in the position designating 
each vowel sound:—pä V, pe À, po>, pu <. The original of this 
letter is preserved in the library of Victoria College, Toronto. 
But this process of discovery and invention seems to have received 
a temporary check from the disapproval of the Bible Society, which 
was now undertaking the printing of the Scriptures in the Ojibway 
language. He, therefore, directed his efforts to a more perfect presenta- 
tion of the language in the Roman alphabet, and of this his Speller and 
Interpreter is the result. In his letters during the next three years, 
we find frequent reference to the improved orthography and to its effect 
upon the progress of the school children. It was an improvement, but 
not yet fully satisfactory. The children were being taught to read 
English as well as Ojibway, and the common alphabet representing 
essentially different sounds could not prove a perfect success. 
In 1840, as a result of his successful mission work among the 
Algonquins of Eastern Canada, he was chosen to superintend a mission 
to the tribes of the Hudson Bay Territory. There were now but six 
short years of life remaining to him, but they were the harvest years 
