as the churches shall send forth for that end and purpose. Lord hasten those good days, and pour out that good spirit upon thy people! Amen.”
One cannot but wish that Eliot might have had for his
help and guidance some of the best practical hints which
the science of phonography has in recent years suggested
in the way of simplicity and labor-saving in the writing
and printing, at least, of a language which as yet has only
been spoken. The evidence is abundant that many of the
English teachers acquired great facility in speaking the
Indian language, but no two of them, in attempting to put
into writing a page or a single sentence of it, would have
fallen upon the same mode of spelling, or would have used
the same number or order of the letters for the same word.
Indeed the field was an admirable one for the trial of
phonography. And it was of course wholly by the sound that
Eliot was guided in his choice and collocation of letters for
a word. He had arbitrary power in the case. Any one
who mechanically turns over the pages of either of his
Indian works can hardly resist the conviction that he might
have dispensed with a considerable number both of the
consonants and vowels lavishly used by him. But he sought
to do full justice to those large elements of the medium of
converse among his disciples which he found to consist of
gutturals and of grunts. Within the space of a few pages
of the same book we notice the words aukooks and ohkukes,
as giving the name of the stone-kettles of the Indians.
Either of a dozen other collocations of letters would have
served equally well for the symbol of the sound. It was to
his great relief and help that Eliot learned that in the
structure of the Indian grammatical forms there was a
regularity and method as strict and systematic as in those of
the classical languages, though quite unlike theirs. Gender
and number, moods and tenses, direction, relation, etc.,
found their full definition in augments or inflections. As
in our unskilled ignorance we try to understand anything
