Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/12

Vlll PREFACE. " to write to the powers of Europe, Asia, and America ; and application was accordingly made to President Washington for our' Indian languages, several specimens of which were accord- ingly furnished." A portion of the iesults of those inquiries may be seen in the Transactions of he Academy of St. Peters- burgh, in the accounts of Russian voyages of discovery, and in the works of various men of science, who have flourished under the patronage of the Empress and her successors. From the materials thus collected, the celebrated production of the German philologists, Adelung and Vater, proceeded in part, which has been followed within a kw years by the more finished and extended work of Balbi, published in France, but dedicated to the Emperor of Russia. In the former, the collection of American dialects was both incomplete and deficient in accu- racy ; in the compilation of the latter, the author consulted the manuscript essay of Mr. Gallatin, in its original state, which is published in the present volume, after having been much en- larged by the addition of copious vocabularies and other ap- propriate matter. The labors of other writers, who at different periods have bestowed their attention on the Indian languages, are to be referred to the first branch of investigations, limited to the dis- tinct consideration of individual dialects. The works of Eliot, Cotton, Roger Williams, and Edwards, in New England ; the Dictionary of Father Rasle, illustrated by the learned and just discrimination of Pickering ; and the researches of Heckewel- der and Zeisberger, on whose data have been reared the philo- logical hypotheses and acute disquisitions of Du Ponceau ; are all of this class. It remained for Mr. Gallatin to bring together, in a comparative view, the languages and dialects of all the nations, so far as authentic specimens of them could be procured, and to describe the various analogies of structure and charac- teristic features existing among them. This we regard as the second step towards a complete philosophical view of the whole ground, now for the first time attempted on a scale commensu- rate with its importance, and executed in a manner, which