158 BULLETIN OF DENISON UNIVERSITY. 
seen. His native clearness and grace, united with the well-known 
characteristics of German, could not but produce unusual results. 
The literatures of England, Spain, and Italy were open to him. 
He was able to talk with the captains of American ships, which he 
saw in every port and on every sea, and with British officers in Ply- 
mouth ; though his conversation in their tongue was the only thing 
that induced those grave taciturn men to laugh. His Spanish, while 
yet in Germany, enabled him to read Don Quixote in the original ; it 
served him in both hemispheres as naturalist, and at San Francisco as 
diplomat. His title to acquaintance with Italian may be indicated by 
the fact that he naturalized in German poetry the peculiar verse of 
Dante, employing it for example, in Salas y Gomez ^ perhaps his most 
admired poem. Russian he began on the Rurik, but soon abandoned, 
finding that his ignorance of the language served as a welcome and 
effective barrier against his too often uncongenial companions in the 
crowded ship’s cabin. Yet we find among his poems translations from 
Russian as well as more recondite sources, like the Lithuanian and 
Icelandic. His ability to use and enjoy Latin goes without saying, and 
Greek, learned while a soldier, very early made Homer at least a 
delightful companion. 
All this made Chamisso certainly a linguist, but perhaps not a phi- 
lologist. His work, however, in the languages of the Pacific, though 
soon superseded by investigations of more favored travelers and, in 
some cases, of American and English missionaries, may entitle him to 
the second name. In collecting word-lists and other examples of three 
Polynesian dialects, those of the Philippine Islands, the Radack chain, 
and Hawaii, he performed a great work, which deserves mention. 
Kadu also should be mentioned, the native who accompanied the 
Rurik upon its second passage from Polynesia to the Russian posses- 
sions and back to his home, and who rendered valuable aid in Cham- 
isso’s study of ethnology and anthropology as well as of language. The 
Radack dialect, whose written form has since been a much discussed 
problem, was, by an expedient that at least served in recording daily 
acquisitions of words, reduced for the first time* to writing. 
