To the modern comparative philologist
his work is of great value. He published not only an excellent Indian
grammar, but a complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts
language,--a monument of prodigious labour. It is one of the most
instructive documents in existence for the student of Algonquin speech,
though the Massachusetts tribe and its language have long been extinct,
and there are very few scholars living who can read the book. It has
become one of the curiosities of literature and at auction sales of
private libraries commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare
book the American public has somehow or other within the last five
or six years contrived to pick up a word which we shall very likely
continue to hear for some time to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which
means a great chief--such as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab--is "mugwump."
It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small
Indian village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College,
and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the
undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines
of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of
Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might
now be reclaimed.
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