[110]. The illustrious Professors Adelung and Vater, and Baron Humboldt, deserve a special mention. They are the authors of that astonishing work, the Mithridates.
[111]. The Cherokee language exceeds even the Greek in its power to express, by the inflection of a single word, delicate modifications of thought. An example is given in the Appendix to the 6th volume of the Encyclopædia Americana. It is also a specimen of the length to which the words in the Indian languages are often extended. The word is, Winitaw´tigeginaliskawlungtanawneli´tisesti, which may be rendered, “They will by that time have nearly done granting [favors] from a distance to thee and to me.” This word is understood to be regularly inflected, according to fixed rules. If so, the Cherokee language must have an arrangement of modes, tenses and numbers, which few if any other languages on earth can equal.
[112]. 2 His. Col. ix. 227.
[113]. The number assigned, in the same work, to Europe, is 587; to Africa, 276; to Asia, 987. Total, in the world, 3064.
[114]. 2 His. Col. ix. 233, 234.
[115]. Heckewelder and Edwards assert this fact.
[116]. Key, introduction.
[117]. Vattel’s Law of Nations, book i. sections 81 and 209.
[118]. “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” Genesis, i. 28.
[119]. The patents which they brought with them were, in theory, unjust; for they implied, in terms, the absolute control of the English monarch over the ceded territory, and contained no recognition of the rights of the natives. But the Christian integrity of the Pilgrims corrected, in practice, the error or defect of the patents. An able writer says: “It is beyond all question, that the early settlers at Plymouth, at Saybrook, and, as a general rule, all along the Atlantic coast, purchased the lands upon which they settled, and proceeded in their settlements with the consent of the natives. Nineteen twentieths of the land in the Atlantic States, and nearly all the land settled by the whites in the western States, came into our possession as the result of amicable treaties.” “The settlers usually gave as much for land as it was then worth, according to any fair and judicious estimate. An Indian would sell a square mile of land for a blanket and a jack-knife; and this would appear to many to be a fraudulent bargain. It would, however, by no means deserve such an appellation. The knife alone would add more to the comfort of an Indian, and more to his wealth, than forty square miles of land, in the actual circumstances of the case.” See a very judicious article in the North American Review, for October, 1830. We may add, that, at this day, a square mile of land might be bought in some parts of the United States, for less than the first settlers paid the Indians for their lands. Indeed, as the writer just quoted says, “There are millions of acres of land in the Carolinas, which would not, at this moment, be accepted as a gift, and yet much of this land will produce, with very little labor, one hundred and fifty bushels of sweet potatoes to the acre.” Vattel says, (book i. § 209) “We cannot help praising the moderation of the English puritans, who first settled in New-England, who, notwithstanding their being furnished with a charter from their sovereign, purchased of the Indians the land they resolved to cultivate. This laudable example was followed by Mr. William Penn, who planted the colony of Quakers in Pennsylvania.”