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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