INTRODUCTION 



Bv Edward E\'ekett Hale 



Dr Trumbull's vocabularies constitute the most important contribu- 

 tion to tlie scientitic study of Eliot's Indian Bilile which has V)een made 

 since that wonderful book was published. 



To the prepai'ation of these vocabularies James Hammond Traml)ull 

 gave most of his time throughout the closing years of his diligent and 

 valuable life. The work was so nearly finished when he died that, as 

 the reader will see, it is clearly best to print it as he left it, and to leave 

 it to the careful students of the future for completion by such work as 

 he has made comparativelv easy. By her generous gift of the beau- 

 tiful tinished manuscript to the American Anticjuarian Society, his 

 widow, Mrs Sarah Robinson Trumbull, has made its immediate pub- 

 lication possible. The officers of the society at once consulted Major 

 Powell, the Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, as to the 

 best plan for its publication. The Bureau placed the uianuscript in 

 the hands of Dr Albert S. Gatschet, of the ethnologic staff; and the 

 book has had the great advantage of his extended acc^uaintance with 

 Algonquian languages as it passed thi'ough the press. 



It is hoped that the l)ook will form the first volume in a series of 

 vocabularies of the native languages. Such a series, under such 

 supervision as the Bureau will give to the selection and editing of the 

 works contained in it, M-ill be of great value to students of language; 

 but it will contain no book more valuable in itself or more interesting 

 from its history than Dr Trumbull's Dictionaiw. 



Even in circles of people who should be l)etter informed, we fre- 

 fjuently hear it .said that the Bible of Eliot is now nothing but a liter- 

 ary curiosity, and hardly that. Such an expression is unjust to Eliot's 

 good sense, and it is (juite untrue. Reverend J. A. Gilfillan, whose 

 work of education among the northern tribes is so remarkable, found 

 that his intelligent Chippewa companions were greatly interested in 

 the Bible of Eliot, and readily caught the analogies of the language 

 with their own when the system of spelling and of vocalization was 

 explained to them. 



With great good sense, Eliot used the English letters with the 

 sounds which Englishmen oave tiiem. When the American Home 



