e is surrounded by all the elements of poetry and
eloquence--tempests, woods, waters, skies. His mythology is poetic. His
world is replete with spirits and gods of all imaginable kinds and hues.
His very position--a race falling before civilization, and obliged to
give up the bow and arrow for the plough--is poetic and artistic. But he
has no sustained eloquence, no continuous trains of varying thought. It
is the flash, the crack of contending elements. It is not the steady
sound of the waterfall. Such was the eloquent appeal of Logan, revised
and pointed by Gibson. Such was the more sustained speech of Garangula
to La Barrie, the Governor-General of Canada, with La Hontan as a
reporter. Such were the speeches of Pontiac and the eloquent Sagoyawata,
or Red Jacket, the readiest reasoner of them all, which were diluted
rather than improved by admiring paragraphists. Many persons have
purposed to write a volume of Indian eloquence. Mr. Conant's design on
this subject is fresh. The present request is to supply Mr. Barker, the
publisher of "Stephen's Greek Thesaurus," Cambridge, England. What under
the sun do the learned world suppose the Indians are made of? A man
spending his time painfully to catch a beaver, or entrap an enemy,
without stores of thought, without leisure, with nothing often to eat,
and nothing to put on but tatters and rags, and, withal, with the whole
Anglo-Saxon race treading on his toes and burning out his vitals with
ardent spirits. Such is the Indian.

I sent the learned professor some perfectly truthful specimens, recently
delivered here on the occasion of a surgeon from the fort digging up the
body of an Indian woman for dissection. They expressed plain truth
without eloquence, and I never heard anything more of the professor.

_30th. Science in America_.--I received a friendly letter from Dr.
Samuel L. Mitchell, N. Y. There are, of recent years, more purely
scientific men in the land, no doubt, than the venerable doctor. But
could this have been said truly even ten years ago? He is now, perhaps,
the best ichthyologist in the Union. He is a well-read zoologist, an
intelligent botanist and a general physiologist, and has been for a long
series of years the focus of the diffusion of knowledge on a great
variety of subjects. Gov. Clinton has well called him the "Delphic
Oracle" in one of his Letters of Hibernicus, because every one who has a
scientific question to ask comes to him.

"The Lyceum of Na