In the Memoirs of the American Academy for 1818 appeared his Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages of North America. The uncertainty of their orthography arose from the circumstance that the words were collected and reduced to writing by scholars of different nations, who often attached different values to the same letter, and represented the same sound by different letters; so that it was impossible to determine the sound of a written word, without first knowing through what alembic of speech it had passed. Thus the words of the same language or dialect, written by a German, a Frenchman, or an Englishman, would seem to belong to languages as widely different as those of these different people. With the hope of removing from the path of others the perplexities that had beset his own, Mr. Pickering recommended the adoption of a common orthography, which would enable foreigners to use our books without difficulty, and, on the other hand, make theirs easy for us. To this end, he devised an alphabet for the Indian languages, which contained the common letters of our alphabet, so far as practicable, a class of nasals, also of diphthongs, and, lastly, a number of compound characters, which it was supposed would be of more or less frequent use in different dialects. With regard to this Essay, Mr. Du Ponceau said, at an early day, "If, as there is great reason to expect, Mr. Pickering's orthography gets into general use among us, America will have had the honor of taking the lead in procuring an important auxiliary to philological science."[149] Perhaps no single paper on language, since the legendary labors of Cadmus, has exercised a more important influence than this communication. Though originally composed with a view to the Indian languages of North America, it has been successfully followed by the missionaries in the Polynesian Islands. In harmony with the principles of this Essay, the unwritten dialect of the Sandwich Islands, possessing, it is said, a more than Italian softness, was reduced to writing according to a systematic orthography prepared by Mr. Pickering, and is now employed in two newspapers published by natives. Thus he may be regarded as one of the contributors to that civilization, under whose gentle influence those islands, set like richest gems in the bosom of the sea, will yet glow with the effulgence of Christian truth. [149] Notes on Eliot's Indian Grammar, Mass. Hist. Coll., Second Series, Vol. IX. p. xi. I cannot forbear adding, that in the correspondence of Leibnitz there is a proposition for a new alphabet of the Arabic, Æthiopic, Syriac, and similar languages, which may remind the reader of that of Mr. Pickering. Leibnitz, Opera (ed. Dutens), Vol. VI. p. 88.