Excerpt from Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley Academy of History, Madrid, being the only American who has ever received this honor. Having a natural taste for linguistics, and finding as he pur sued his studies some knowledge of the Indian languages requisite he began investigating their structure, relationship, grammar, and vocabulary. His researches having brought together a num ber of manuscripts, chiefly by early missionaries, and regretting the general indifference among American scholars for such studies, he published in 1860 the first of a series in fifteen volumes of grammars and dictionaries of Indian languages, entitled Library of American Linguistics, several Of which he edited and pre pared. No individual or society has ever yet done SO much to save from oblivion the languages spoken by the aboriginal inhabi tants of this country. The articles on Indian tribes in Apple ton's Cyclopaedia are all from the pen of Dr. Shea. In 1857 he printed the first of a series, twenty-six little vol umes, from early manuscripts, chiefly relating to the missions. In these he adopted the type, initial letters, head-lines, and orna ments used by Cramoisy, King's printer at Paris, who published the Jesuit Relations. These volumes went mostly to amateurs here and in Europe, and are highly prized. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.