ficult to
realize from the mere inspection of maps, and reading of books, it is
important at all times to bear in mind, in setting a just value on the
country and its agricultural advantages.

On reaching the city, and before the organization of the legislature, I
received a letter from the Hon. John Davis, President of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, suggesting the publication of my
researches on Indian language.

"Mr. Pickering concurs with me, that it is very desirable to have this
publication effected. Some tracts of this description have been
occasionally published in the collections of our society, and we have no
doubt that this course would be pursued with your work, if such should
be your wish, and no preferable mode of publication should occur."

_29th_.--I received from the Rhode Island Historical Society, a copy of
their publication of Roger Williams' Key to the Indian languages. This
tract was greatly needed by philologists. The language commented on is
clearly of the Algonquin stock. Dr. Edwards, in his "Observations on the
Mukhekanieu," demonstrates that the old Mohecan, as spoken on the
Housatonic, was also of this type.

He says, indeed, that the difference in all the New England languages
spoken by the nations were merely dialectic. What I have heard of
Eliot's Bible of the Natic, or Massachusetts language, favors the same
conclusion. All this shows that the ancestors of the present lake tribes
who speak these dialects, must have overspread all New England. History
is thus taught by language. The lake tribes have only this tradition
respecting the fact, that they came from the _East_.

_30th_.--Dr. A.F. Homes transmits me a diploma of membership of the
Montreal Natural History Society.

_May 14th_.--Mr. Reynolds recurs to the subject of the Ex. Expedition,
which he announced to me on the 5th of February. "It is probable," he
observes, "that an expedition to the South Sea will sail from the City
of New York in September next. I wish, and so do several members of the
national cabinet, that you would join it, and be the head of the
scientific corps. Your salary shall be almost anything you ask, and your
relation to the general government shall not be prejudiced by a
temporary absence. The expedition will be absent about eighteen months
or two years. Will you not feel some ambition in being connected with
the first American expedition of discovery?"

_20th_.--Death is ever busy, thinning the r