, and expressing his opinion of success, unless I
should be "cursed with a bad publisher."

"Father Duponceau," he says, "won his prize out of your books, and
Gallatin owes much to you. Go on; persevere; build a monument to
yourself and the unhappy Algonquin race."

Making every allowance for Mr. Bancroft's enthusiastic way of speaking,
it yet appears to me that I should endeavor to publish the results of
investigations of Indian subjects. My connection with the Johnston
family has thrown open to me the whole arcanum of the Indian's thoughts.

I wrote an article for Dr. Absalom Peter's Magazine, expressing my
dissent from the very fanciful explanations of the Dighton Rock
characters, as given by Mr. Magrusen in the first volume of the Royal
Society of Northern Antiquarians, published at Copenhagen. It appears to
me that those characters (throwing out two or three) are the Indian
_Kekewin_--a species of hieroglyphics or symbolic devices, still in
vogue among them. To this view of the matter Mr. Bancroft assents. "If
you have a proof-sheet of your article on the Daneschrift, send it me.
All they say about the Dighton Rock is, I think, the sublime of
humbuggery."

What is said in the interpreted Sagas, of the Skroellings or Esquimaux
being in New England at the date of Eric's voyage (A. D. 1001) is, I
think, problematical. Those tribes are not known to have extended
further south than the Straits of Belleisle, about 60 deg., or to parts of
Newfoundland. The term deduced from the old journals appear to belong to
the Esquimaux proper, rather than to the New England class of the
Algonquins. The Esquimaux had the free use of the sound of the letter
_l_, which was not used at all by the N.E. Indians.

Mr. Gallatin, in a letter of Feb. 22, in response to me on this subject,
says: "The letter _L_ occurs in every Esquimaux dialect of which I have
any knowledge. Thus heaven or sky, is in Greenland, _Killak_; Hudson's
Bay, _Keiluk_; Kadick Islands, _Kelisk_; Kotzebue's Sound, _Keilyak_;
Asiatic Tshuktchi, _Kuelok_.

"I am not so certain about the _v_, which I find used only by Egede, or
Crantz (not distinguished from each other in my collection) for the
Greenland dialect. In their conjurations I find 'we (sing. and dual)
wash them' Ernikp-auvut, and Ernikp-auvuk. In the Mithradites, the same
letter _v_ is repeatedly used in dual examples of the Greenland and
Labrador dialects, principally (as it appears to me) but not exclusiv