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familiar to us as the original occupants of almost the entire Atlantic coasts, the great lakes, and the sources of the Mississippi. Recent investigations of the language, denote that this stock entirely subtend the Dacotas, and must have crossed the Missouri in its higher latitudes. It is no longer doubtful that the Satsika or Blackfeet, are of the Algonquin family. the Blood Indians, who are placed by Makenzie, in 19793, at the Falls of the Saskatchewine, are known to be of the stock of the Blackfeet. All the various bands who rove over the Upper Missouri, under the names of Piegans or Pagans, are clearly Blackfeet.

Of the Iroquois, who appear to have thrust themselves at an early date, into the midst of the great Algonquin groupe in Western New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Canadas, reaching, at the earliest notice in 1534, to the present size of Montreal, and descending the St. Lawrence at times, to the sea, our information is nearly complete. 

In the south, the Muscogees, the Choctaws and their kindred, the Chickasaws, constitute the basis of the groupe which is provisionally called Appalachian. The tribe of the Cherokees, the almost extinct Catawbas, and the Natchez and Utchees, may require eventually to be arranged on principles to be developed by researches into the imperfectly known ethnology of Texas, New Mexico, and California.

Whatever these principles of speech of the extreme south-western tribes of the Union, as now constituted, are, we must proceed in studying them, by the same process of investigating vocabularies and grammars, which has been employed in the classification of the languages of the Old States. All our Indian tongues are highly composite, and strike the orientalist like the recomposed fragments of very old languages. Words consist of congeries of syllables, which are pressed together, so to say, on a peculiar plan, and are made to convey ideas, which is the languages of western Europe, are, for the most part, committed to elementary forms. As mediums of expression, they have some redundances, some refinements, some striking peculiarities, and some glaring defects. They abound in derivatives and compound phrases, which are remarkable for the graphic description of scenery and objects in the visible creation. They are evidently constructed on the basis of a limited number of stock particles, or simple radices, which admit multiform accessories for number, person, quality and position; but all which may afterwards be shorn away, in forming new compounds, without at all altering the original and generic meaning of their reforms. Still, these forms are seldom or never seen in their elementary attire.

It may not be inappropriate, in sending out this vocabulary, to indicate some of the simplest forms of these compounds. We must go into the examination of the western languages, with the principles which have already been developed and established. One of the practical difficulties to be guarded against, by interpreters and recorders of vocabularies, arises from the liability of imprecision, in the extent and true syllabication of words. In a class of languages of so concrete and transpositive a character, in which nouns, verbs, pronouns and attributes, and even prepositions, may all mingle and are represented, more or less fully in a single phrase, it is all important to recognize its ultimate syllable, and not to confound it with adjuncts or words, which follow it in a rapid succession. All foreign, or rather unknown languages have, indeed, to the casual hearer, this apparent character of continuousness, or "agglomeration." A listener of French or German, ignorant of either, is liable to the same imprecision.

Utterance among all our aborigines is rapid and unintermitted till the sentence be finished. Its accented syllables roll flowingly upon the ear, with scarcely an appreciation of the under tones and short vowels. The rule of quantity varies through a wide and strange scale -- some words being simply clipped, others cut short suddenly, or long drawn out. Its vowels have a very wide compass of sound, and are often cramped and twisted, so to say, by the odd juxtaposition of consonants. But until the process of thought be well understood, and the primary or root forms of the words fixed in the memory, with the principles of their combination, there must be a perpetual liability to misapprehension and mistake. It requires but a glance at the vague vocabularies of tourists and travelers of the picturesque or galloping class, to render this fact striking to the philologist.

To speak, and accurately to record speech, are seen to be antipodal arts in the chain of civilization. The Indian speaker, has from his childhood, heard his native language, in its concrete forms. His ear has been taught to know the meaning of the primary or root forms, which denote life, motion, sound, and other generic senses, so as to recognize them, in the varied garbs and limited senses, which they assume in the compounds, the conjugations and the declensions. His very interjections are clogged with the transitive application. His ears have been early accustomed to these laws of the forest grammar. He has learned them by rote. They present to his ears a system of