bore no relation to the language, or its necessities.  Like all other benefactors of the race, he had to encounter a little of the ridicule of those who, being too ignorant to comprehend, maintain their credit by sneering.  The rapid progress of the language among the people settled the matter, however.  The 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.

George Gist received all honor from his countrymen.  A short time after his invention written communication was opened up by means of it with that portion of the Cherokee Nation then in their new home west of the Arkansas.  Zealous in his work, he traveled many hundred miles to teach it to them; and it is no reproach to their intellect to say that they received it readily.

It has been said the Indians are besotted against all improvements.  The cordiality with which this was received is worthy of attention.

In 1823 the General Council of the Cherokee Nation voted a large silver medal to George Gist as a mark of distinction for his discovery.  On one side were two pipes, the ancient symbol of Indian religion and law; on the other a man’s head.  The medal had the following inscription in English, also in, Cherokee in his own alphabet: