Acosta, Benzo, etc., and shows considerable aptness of logic in adapting his theories to his investigations into the structure of the Indian languages. Such nice verbal distinctions, such order and symmetry, such a train of subtle and exact religious terms, he argues, could not be invented by a people so ignorant and illiterate as the modern Indian, and contends that they obviously bear all the distinctive marks of a language of culture. He further declares that one of the Chickasaw prophets, _the Loache_, assured him that they had once had an "old beloved speech," which in the course of time and national degeneration they had lost. In this connection, but entirely apart from all Hebraic analogies, one is moved to wonder if there were also among them a reminiscence of an "old beloved character," and if the extraordinary invention of the Cherokee character of the "syllabic alphabet" by the Indian, Guest, early in the present century, partly partakes of the nature of tradition. 3 Page 22. The high value which the French government placed on the services of these allies may be inferred from a remark which has come down from a council of state, in reference to their conduct in this battle: "_Quoique je n'approuve pas qu'on mange les morts, cependant il ne faut pas quereller avec ces bonnêtes gens pour des bagatelles._" 4 Page 38. Among others bearing witness to these strange relics, Timothy Flint says, in his _History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley_: "In this state [Tennessee] burying grounds have been found where the skeletons seem all to have been pigmies. The graves in which the bodies were deposited are seldom more than two feet or two feet and a half in length. To obviate the objection that these are all the bodies of children, it is affirmed that the skulls are found to have possessed the _dentes sapientiæ_ and must have belonged to persons of mature age. The two bodies that were found in the vast limestone cavern in Tennessee, one of which I saw at Lexington, were neither of them more than four feet high; the hair seemed to have been sandy, or inclining to yellow. It is well known that nothing is so uniform in the present Indian as his lank, black hair. From the pains taken to preserve the bodies, and the great labor of making the funeral robes in which they were folded, they must have been of the 'blood royal' or personages of consideration in their day." (Hayward, in his quaint and rare _Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee_, referring to the curious method of interment, in a copperas cave, of two mummies, both of full size, however, arrayed in fabrics of great beauty, evincing much mechanical skill in manufacture, also mentions the hair on the heads of both as long, and of a yellow cast and a fine texture.) Webber, in his _Romance of Natural History_, gives the size of the diminutive sarcophagi of the supposed pygmies found in Tennessee as three feet in length by eighteen inches in depth.