astonishing rapidity with which it is acquired has always been a
wonder, and was the first thing about it that struck the writer of
this article. In my own observation, Indian children will take one
or two, at times several, years to master the English printed and
written language, but in a few days can read and write in
Cherokee. They do the latter, in fact, as soon as they learn to
shape letters. As soon as they master the alphabet they have got
rid of all the perplexing questions in orthography that puzzle the
brains of our children. Is it not too much to say that a child
will learn in a month, by the same effort, as thoroughly, in the
language of Se-quo-yah, that which in ours consumes the time of
our children for at least two years.

There has been a great clamor for a universal language. We once
had it, in our learned world, in the Latin, in which books were
locked up for the scholars and dead to the world. Language is the
handmaiden of thought, and to be useful must be obedient to its
changes as well as its elemental characteristics. For the English
of three hundred years ago we need a glossary, and to carry down
his immortal thoughts in their pristine vigor, must have, every
two hundred years, a Johnson to modernize a Shakspeare. To probe
the causes of the change of language, to ascertain why even a
WRITTEN language is mutable, to pick up this garment of thought
and run its threads back through all their vagaries to their
origin and points of divergence, is one of the grand tasks for the
intellectual historian. He, indeed, must give us the history of
ideas, of which all art, including language, is but the
fructification. To say, therefore, that the alphabet of Se-quo-yah
is better adapted for his language than our alphabet is for the
English, would be to pay it a very wretched compliment.