54 TRANSACTION'S OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. V, 



Mallery's Picture Writing of the American Indians. These are quite 

 distinct from inscriptions in phonetic characters found in both areas. 

 The authors of the phonetic inscriptions in India and Siberia were 

 Buddhist monks, or those of them who constituted a caste of Scribes. 

 In both countries, and the same is true of Japan, although the inscrip- 

 tions of that empire yet pubHshed are too vague and fragmentary to 

 read, the language of the documents is pure, if somewhat archaic, Japan- 

 ese, a fact of which I was not aware when, many years ago, I essayed 

 the decipherment of one of the Davenport tablets. In several communi- 

 cations to the Institute, I have shewn that the affiliation of most of our 

 North American aboriginal languages, such as, to use thcdesignations 

 of Pilling, the Siouan, Iroquoian, and Muskhogean, are with the Sibero- 

 Japanese or Khitan tongues of Northeastern Asia, in whose area the 

 literary Japanese was the classical form of speech. It was ali^o the 

 classical tongue in aboriginal literary North America ; and, even at the 

 present day, the Muskhogean group, including the Choctaw, Chickasaw,. 

 Creek, and Seminole, furnishes a series of dialects differing as little from 

 the Japanese as English does from German. It is, therefore, no matter 

 for astonishment to find the Japanese of Siberia repeating itself in the 

 records of our Mound Builders. Competent Japanese scholars, such as 

 the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Goble, of Philadelphia, cheerfully admit that my 

 translations of the Siberian inscriptions are idiomatic Japanese, and it 

 is in the power of any intelligent person to test the consistency of my 

 transliteration of the American texts, and to submit the language they 

 yield to the judgment of experts. 



A melancholy interest attaches to my task, inasmuch as most of the 

 scholars who kindly furnished me with copies of the inscriptions have 

 passed away out of this life. Such are Dr. Farquharson, of Davenport^ 

 Iowa ; Colonel Charles Whittlesey, of Cleveland, Ohio ; Professor E. N. 

 Horsford, of Cambridge, Ma.ss.; and Sir Daniel Wilson, of Toronto. Of 

 my other benefactor in this respect. Professor Hilder, of St. Louis, Mo.,. 

 I have not heard for a long time, but trust that he is still among us in 

 body as well as in spirit. It would have been a great gratification to 

 me to have had their matured judgment on my epigraphic researches, 

 which were not sufficiently advanced to allow of my submitting the 

 finished result to their benevolent scrutiny. This paper may have the 

 effect of bringing to light other literary records of the Mound Builders 

 and their descendants, which have been withheld from public gaze in 

 order to save their innocent possessors from the odious charge of forgery, 

 so maliciously and ignorantly brought against the finders of those that 

 have been published. 



