Jan. 4th.  The American Lyceum request me to prepare a paper for their sixth anniversary.

6th.  I received a letter from my former pastor, Rev. J. Porter, at Peoria, Ill., denoting him to be in a new field of ministerial labor.

“I bade adieu to my dear people at Chicago, on the second Sabbath in November, and commenced my labors here on the fourth Sabbath of the same month—­just four years from the day I first preached at the Sault.

“The town is on the north bank of Lake Peoria, which is an expansion of the Illinois.  The site is one of the first in our land.  The ground rises with a delightful slope from the water’s edge for the distance of half a mile—­then there is table land for another half mile back to a high bluff.  The town began to be built about two years since; it has now a population of eight hundred and fifty.”

A descendant of the great theologian Edwards, it is pleasing to note that this gentleman is destined to be employed in various fields, in diffusing Christianity through the great valley.

8th.  Mr. Thomas L. Winthrop, of Boston, transmits me “the first volume of a new series of the Transactions of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  This volume, amongst other valuable matter, contains a Dictionary of the Abinaki Language of North America, by Father Sebastian Rasles.”

10th.  I addressed a memoir to the Secretary of War on the state of Indian affairs in Oregon.  My position at St. Mary’s being on the great line of communication between Montreal and the principal posts at Vancouver, &c., north of the Columbia, has afforded me opportunities of becoming familiar with the leading policy of the Hudson’s Bay factors in relation to that region.  The means pursued are such as must influence all the Indian tribes in that quarter strongly in favor of the political power wielded by that company, and as strongly against the government of the United States, which has not a shadow of a power of any kind on the Pacific.  Silently, but surely, a vast influence is being built up on those coasts, adverse to our claims to the territory, and it cannot be long till those intrepid factors, sustained by the government at home, will assert it in a manner not easy to be resisted.  I embodied these ideas strongly in my paper.  The Secretary was arrested by the justice of my conclusions, and seemed disposed to do something, but the subject was, apparently, weighed down and forgotten in the press of other matters.

13th.  Hon. E. Whittlesey, Chairman of the Committee on Claims, House of Representatives, remarks in effect, in a letter of this date, that to create a just claim against the United States, it must be shown that property and provisions taken by the troops, when operating in an enemy’s country, were applied to the subsistence or clothing of the army or navy, although it was private property, and the orders of the commandant were, in all cases, to