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 Natural History,” he writes, “is going on prosperously in the collection of articles and in the publication of intelligence.  The museum is enlarging and the annals progressing.  The intercourse of New York city with almost numberless parts of the globe, aided by the enterprise and generosity of our navigating citizens, is productive of an almost constant supply of natural productions, some familiar, some known to naturalists, but not before seen by us, and others new to the whole class of observers.”

Dec. 1st.  Much leisure during the four years I have been at this agency, added to an early developed distaste for the ordinary modes of killing time, has enabled me to give no little of my leisure to literary pursuits.  The interesting phenomena of the Indian grammar have come in for a large share of my attention.  This has caused me to revise and extend my early studies, and to rummage such books on general grammar and philology as I could lay my hands on.  Every winter, beginning as soon as the navigation closes and the world is fairly shut out, has thus constituted a season of studies.  My attention has been perpetually divided between books and living interpreters.  This may be said to be my fourth year’s course with the Johnstons on the languages.

I have also resumed, as an alternate amusement, “The Literary Voyager.”  I wrote this year “The Man of Bronze,” an essay on the Indian character, which has contributed to my own amusement, nor have I determined to show it to a human eye.