MALLERY.] KAUDER’S SYSTEM. 671 
formule of the church, by the use of which it was supposed that they 
would gain salvation. The formation of an alphabet, or even a sylla- 
bary, by which the structure of the language should be considered and 
its vocal expression recorded, was not the object. It is possible that 
there was an objection to the instruction of the Indians in a modern 
alphabet by which they might more readily learn either French or 
English, and at the same time be able to read profane literature and 
thereby become perverted from the faith. These missionaries cer- 
tainly refrained, for some reason, not only from instructing the heathen 
in any of the languages of civilization, but also from teaching them 
the use of an alphabet for their own language. 
It is probable that Father Kauder had some idea of reducing the 
language of the Micmacs to a written form, based not upon verbal or 
even syllabic notation, but upon some anomalous compromise between 
their ideographic original or substratum and a grammatic superstrue- 
ture. If so, he entirely failed. The interesting point with regard to 
this remarkable and unique attempt is, that there is undoubtedly a 
basis of Indian designs and symbols included and occluded among the 
differentiated devices in the three volumes mentioned, which arbitrarily 
express thoughts and words by a false pictographic method, instead of 
sentences and verses. But the change from the pictorial forms to those 
adopted, if not as radical as that from the Egyptian hieroglyphs to 
the Roman text, resembles that from the archaic to the modern Chinese. 
Therefore it would follow that the present form of the characters is not 
one which the Indians would learn more readily than an alphabet or 
a syllabary, and that is the ascertained fact. At Cow bay, a Micmac 
camp, about 12 miles from Halifax, an aged chief who in his boyhood 
at Cape Breton island was himself instructed by Father Kauder in 
these characters, explained that Kauder taught them to the boys by 
drawing them on a blackboard and by repetition, very much in the 
manner in which a schoolmaster in civilized countries teaches the al- 
phabet to children. The actual success of the Cherokees in the free 
and general use of Sequoya’s Syllabary, which was not founded on 
pictographs, but on signs for sounds, should be noted in this connection. 
Among the thousands of scratchings on the Kejemkoojik rocks, many 
of which were undoubtedly made by the Micmac, only two characters 
were found resembling any in Kauder’s volumes, and those were com- 
mon symbols of the Roman Catholic Church, and might readily have 
been made by the Frenchmen, who also certainly left scratchings there. 
Altogether after careful study of the subject it is considered that the 
devices in Father Kauder’s work are so intrinsically changed, both in 
form and intent, from the genuine Micmac designs that they can not be 
presented as examples of Indian pictography. 
Connected with this topic is the following account in the Jesuit Rela- 
tions of 1646, p. 31, relative to the Montagnais and other Algonquians of 
the St. Lawrence river, near the Saguenay: ‘They confess themselves 
with admirable frankness; some of them carry small sticks to remind 
