Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/476

456 In 1680 a second edition of the New Testament was printed, and in 1685 another edition of two thousand copies of the Old Testament appeared, to supply the loss in the wreck of King Philip's war. The cost of this second imprint of the Bible was a thousand pounds. Its title is, “Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up Biblum God Naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament.” Copies of the book have been sold recently for more than a thousand dollars each. Generous as were the contributions made in England to this work, the Commissioners were equally earnest in their appeals for more, and needed an occasional reminder from the officers of the Society that their funds were limited. It is somewhat curious to note a fact appearing on the record, that these officers of a society with the King's charter, in making remittances here of silver “pieces of eight,” — Spanish dollars, — approve the reminting of the specie, at a profit, in Boston, in contravention of the King's prerogative.

Father J. F. Chaumonot, who spent fifty years among the Hurons, made a dictionary of their language which has never been recovered. Father Sebastian Ralle made a vocabulary of the Abnaki tongue, which, as one of the spoils of war, was seized by the Massachusetts soldiers, and has been published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Eliot's Indian Bible, having long since ceased to serve the uses of piety, — except as the very sight and history of it will ever have a sacramental power, — has a value assigned to it in abstruse philological and linguistic studies by such scholars as Adelung, Duponeeau, Pickering, Professor Whitney, and Max Müller.

What would have been the later working and the continuous and final results of the experiment put on trial among the Massachusetts Indians, if left to a natural and peaceful development, fostered and not obstructed, is certainly a question of interest. But it would seem to admit of but one decision, to be inferred from all the knowledge