INDIAN LANGUAGES.
An immense field is opened before my view, in the linguistic and historic works, which we owe to the sixteenth century. On their arrival the missionaries found themselves face to face with a language entirely unknown to the inhabitants of the Old World; and as they progressed with their apostolic labors they discovered with pain that this land, where the curse of Babel seems to have fallen with especial weight, was full of different languages, of all forms and structures, some polished, others barbarous, for which they had neither interpreters, nor teachers, nor books, and for the most part not even a people of culture who spoke them. That difficulty in itself would suffice to discourage the most intrepid mind; but there did not in the world exist anything which could quench the fire of charity with which the missionaries were aglow. They undertook the contest with the hundred-headed monster and vanquished him. Today the study of a group of languages, or even of one tongue, raises the fame of the philologist to the clouds, although he usually finds the way pathed out for him by previous labors; but the missionaries learned, or rather divined all, from the first beginnings; a single man at times attacked five or six of these languages without analogy, without a common filiation, without known alphabet, with nothing that might facilitate the task. Today such investigations are made, for the most part, in the tranquillity and shelter of the study; then, in the fields, the groves, upon the roads, under the open sky, in the midst of fatigues of the mission journey, of hunger, of lack of clothing, of sleeplessness.
The missionaries did not undertake such heavy tasks to attain fame; they did not compare the languages, nor treat them in a scientific way; they tried to reduce them all to the plan of Latin; but they went straight to the practical end of making themselves comprehensible to the natives, and laid firm foundations, upon which might be reared a magnificent structure. The linguistic section of our literature is one of those which