This testimony, from the first and most learned philologist in America, gratified and agreeably surprised me.  I had studied the Chippewa language alone in the forest, without the aid of learned men, or books to aid me.  I addressed myself to it with ardor, it is true, and with the very best oral helps, precisely as I would to investigate any moral or physical truth.  I found that nouns and verbs had a ground form, or root; that this root carried its general and primary meaning into all words or phrases of which it was a compound; and that every syllable or sound of a letter, put before or behind it, conveyed a new and distinct meaning.  By keeping the purposes of a strict philological analysis before me, and by preserving a record of my work, the language soon revealed its principles.  When I had attained a clear idea of these principles myself, and had verified them by reference to, and discussion with, the best native speakers, I could as clearly state them to another.  This is what Mr. Duponceau means by the term “most philosophical.”  The philosophy of the syntax I did not in any respect overstate, but merely recognized or discovered.

In one respect it seemed to me a far more simple language than this eminent writer had represented the Indian languages generally.  And this was in this very philosophy of its syntax.  By synthesis I understand the opposite of analysis—­the one resolving into its elements what the other compounds.  If so, the synthesis of the Chippewa language is clearly, to my mind, homogeneous and of a piece—­a perfect unity, in fact It seems to be, all along, the result of one kind of reasoning, or thinking, or philosophizing.  If, therefore, by the term “polysynthetic,” which Mr. Duponceau, in 1819, introduced for the class of Indian languages, it be meant that its grammar consists of many syntheses, or plans of thought, it did not appear to me that the Chippewa was polysynthetic.  But this I could not state to a man of his learning and standing with the literary public, without incurring the imputation of rashness or assumption.

15th.  P. de Tchehachoff, the Russian gentleman before named, writes to me in the idiom of a foreigner, from Peoria, on his progress through the western country.  “I am anxious,” he remarks, “to take advantage of the first opportunity of writing to you from this remote western world, where since seven days I did not meet with any other beings but wolves and money-getting Yankees.  I must acknowledge that one must have a large lot of curiosity to visit these one-fourth civilized regions (that are by far worse than any real wilderness), for, although they are getting settled at an incredible speed, they don’t offer to the mere lover of the beauties of nature, or improvement of human civilization, any great charm.  Here nature is rich, but, farmerly or businessly speaking, killingly prosaic—­no romance—­no Lake Superior water—­no scenery—­nothing, finally, that could captivate a poetical glance.