s at St. Mary's;
and that I had found it to yield to this process--that the Algonquin
was, in fact, an aggregation of monasyllabic roots: that words and
expressions were formed entirely of a limited number of original roots
and particles, which had generic meanings. That new words, however
compounded, carried these meanings to the Indian ear, and were
understood by it in all possible forms of accretion and syllabication.
That the derivatives founded on these roots of one or two syllables,
could all be taken apart and put together like a piece of machinery.
That the principles were fixed, philosophical, and regular, and that,
although the language had some glaring defects, as the want of a
feminine pronoun, and many redundancies, they were admirably adapted to
describe geographical and meteorological scenes. That it was a language
of _woods and wilds_. That it failed to convey knowledge, only because
it had apparently never been applied to it. And that those philologists
who had represented it as an _agglutinated mass_, and capable of the
most recondite, pronominal, and tensal meanings, exceeding those of
Greece and Rome, had no clear conceptions of what they were speaking
of. That its principles are not, in fact, polysynthetic, but on the
contrary _unasynthetic_: its rules were all of one piece. That, in fine,
we should never get at the truth till we pulled down the, erroneous
fabric of the extreme polysynthesists, which was erected on materials
furnished by an excellent, but entirely unlearned missionary. But that
this could not be done now, such was the _prestige_ of names; and that
he and I, and all humble laborers in the field, must wait to submit our
views till time had opened a favorable door for us. It was our present
duty to accumulate facts, not to set up new theories, nor aim, by any
means, to fight these intellectual giants while we were armed but with
small weapons.

[Footnote 94: A Wesleyan missionary, some time at Port Sarnia, opposite
Fort Gratiot, Canada.]

Mr. Hurlbut entered into these views. He had now reflected upon them,
and he made some suggestions of philological value. He was an apt
learner of the language, as spoken north of the basin of Lake Superior.

"Orthography," he writes, "though of much importance, did not engage so
much of my attention as the construction of the language. I am not so
sanguine as to that performance (the conjugation of the verb _to see_)
as to be anxious to bring forw