This recital exhibits the variety and extent of his studies in a department which is supposed inaccessible, except to peculiar and Herculean labors. He had a natural and intuitive perception of affinities in language, and of its hidden relations. His researches have thrown important light on the general principles of this science, as also on the history and character of individual languages. In devising an alphabet of the Indian tongues in North America, since adopted in the Polynesian Islands, he rendered a brilliant service to civilization. It is pleasant to contemplate the Scholar sending forth from his seclusion this priceless instrument of improvement. On the distant islands once moistened by the blood of Cook newspapers and books are printed in a native language, which was reduced to a written character by the care and genius of Pickering. The Vocabulary of Americanisms and the Greek and English Lexicon attest still further the variety and value of his philological labors; nor can we sufficiently admire the facility with which, amidst the duties of an arduous profession and the temptations of scholarship, he assumed the appalling task of the lexicographer, which Scaliger compares to the labors of the anvil and the mine. There are critics, ignorant, hasty, or supercilious, who are too apt to disparage the toils of the philologist, treating them sometimes as curious only, sometimes as trivial, or, when they enter into lexicography, as those of a harmless drudge. It might be sufficient to reply, that all exercise of the intellect promoting forgetfulness of self and the love of science ministers essentially to human improvement. But philology may claim other suffrages. It is its province to aid in determining the character of words, their extraction and signification, and in other ways to guide and explain the use of language; nor is it generous, while enjoying eloquence, poetry, science, and the many charms of literature, to withhold our gratitude from silent and sometimes obscure labors in illustration of that great instrument without which all the rest is nothing.