It is a notable fact that the great works of the imagination have usually been produced by men nearly innocent of schooling and scholarship. Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Burns, and Abraham Lincoln were all self-taught men. Sequoyah was an absolute illiterate, yet he invented an alphabet. He had no acquaintanceship with the English language, for he disdained the aid of missionaries, and for this reason the most elemental principles of our alphabet were unknown to him. He reasoned, and with no little correctness, that a knowledge of English would be of no avail because of the peculiarities of the Cherokee language. With his own unaided intellect he fashioned a syllabary so extraordinary that it astonishes even the learned, and proved himself a mental giant. Evidently he did not recognize the stops of the human mind, which is almost wholly imitative. Indeed, some of his biographers are unwilling to give him this honor, claiming that his invention was not altogether free from borrowing. But for all that, there are still those who hold that Bacon wrote that which is attributed to Shakespeare. Because man shows an extreme poverty throughout the history of invention, because he rarely tries to do over again that which has been once accomplished, and because he is quicker to grasp and more capable of appropriating, independent inventions are the exception rather than the rule. It must be conceded, in all fairness, that Sequoyah’s syllabary was an invention “par excellence.” Having first conceived the notion that speech could be represented by characters or signs and that if these signs were uniform they would convey the idea intended by the writer, he set out to devise a symbol for each word or idea of the Cherokee tongue. His first step, in other words, was in the direction of the simple pictograph. As the experiment progressed, however, his symbols multiplied fearfully, until, at the end of three years he had thousands of them. It would have been almost impossible for the human mind to retain such a complex multitude of signs. Happily, Sequoyah had a sufficient sense of the practical to realize this. Hence, he abandoned this experiment and started again by making a study of the construction of language itself.