The author of this Journal is Major Jacob Fowler. His name is not attached to the Journal, and does not appear on any of its pages in such a way as to indicate authorship. Yet it is well understood among his numerous descendants now living in Kentucky and other States that he is the author. I obtained the manuscript some years ago from Mrs. Ida Symmes Coates, daughter of the late Americus Symmes, now residing at her country seat near Louisville. Mrs. Coates is a great-granddaughter, on the maternal side, of Jacob Fowler. The manuscript descended to her in a direct line from her mother, Frances Scott, who was a granddaughter of Jacob Fowler, and who had obtained it in the same way from her mother, Abigail Fowler, the only daughter of Jacob Fowler. The manuscript has thus come down to us in a direct line, and is the unquestionable work of Major Jacob Fowler. When Mrs. Coates gave me this manuscript she remarked that although her great-grandsire was a very well educated man, he wrote a very bad hand, and that I might be puzzled now and then in getting at his meaning. I found this to be true, and would not like to say that I succeeded in interpreting all of his modern hieroglyphics. When I placed the manuscript in your hands I felt sure that Lewis and Clark, Pike, and Henry and Thompson, as well as other explorers, had made you so familiar with the country gone over by Major Fowler, that you could with comparative ease master its chirographic difficulties. In this I was right; but I do remember how, with your constantly replenished pipe, you sat in my library, and smoked and puzzled over this manuscript. A distinguished host once assured his guest that the more raw turnips he ate, the more water he would drink, and that the more water he drank, the more turnips he would eat. With a touch of similarity, you smoked and read, and read and smoked, with manifest indications of successful or unsuccessful interpretations of the text, as your puffs were rapid or slow. It might be hard to say whether you smoked most or read most, but you finally mastered the manuscript; and whether you did so by smoking out the uninterpretable hieroglyphics, or got rid of them by other means, does not matter. While a cloud of smoke may not seem to be the best means of clearing up the obscurity of a manuscript, it is the known result here considered, if not the philosophy of its action.