Note 226 — I. VOCABULARIES OF SOME OF THE TRIBES OF NORTHWESTERN AMERICA, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE INDIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

For Duponceau, see our volume xxii, p. 29, note 3.

John, eldest son of Timothy Pickering, the Massachusetts statesman, was born at Salem in 1777; being graduated from Harvard (1796), he began the study of law at Philadelphia, where his father was in residence as a member of the federal cabinet. The following year, however, John went to Portugal as legation secretary, being transferred to the embassy at London, where he remained until 1801. Returning to Salem, he again devoted himself to the legal profession, also to linguistic studies which he had diligently pursued abroad, making contributions to Greek philology, and publishing a lexicon of that language. He was offered chairs of both Hebrew and Greek at Harvard, but declined, preferring to live in Boston, whither he removed in 1829. His interest in North American linguistics was awakened (1819) by Duponceau's work, and the following year he published an "Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America," in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Transactions, iv. He also edited, with copious notes, John Eliot's Indian Grammar, Jonathan Edwards's Observations on the Mohegan Language, and Father Sebastian Rasle's Dictionary of the Abnaki Tongue; and prepared the article on North American languages for the Encyclopædia Americana. Pickering was a member of many learned societies, at one time being president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was granted the degree of LL. D. by both Bowdoin (1822) and Harvard (1835). His death occurred at Boston in 1846.—Ed.