A few small woodcut illustrations in text depicting the artificial cranial modification practice of the “Flathead” Salish people, and pictographic signature glyphs. The author, Wesleyan missionary Benjamin Slight claims to have “spent two years with the Wyandots, or Hurons; afterwards four years with the Missisaughs, or Ochipwas, at the Credit […] also the Mohawks on the Grand River”.
Field has much to say on its linguistic contents: “This unpretending little work is the expression of the personal experience of a candid and thoughtful man, on the structure of the Indian languages. He suggests, what has long been thought, the insuperable difficulty in the way of making our orthographic system, fairly interpret the involved and aggregated forms of the sentence-words of aboriginal tongues. The structure of every dialect of the Algonquin and Huron tongues, comprising every northern tribe, is monosyllabic, so that upon the radical syllable, the sentence is built up, by successive additions, of other syllables, until the idea is complete. These elemental syllables do not in most aboriginal dialects, exceed one hundred, and scarcely a single one of these can be perfectly represented by our system of orthographical analysis”.
No copy in Rare Book Hub since 1972.
Pilling, 3621; Sabin, 82147; Howes, 5554; Field, 1421
