The euphonic changes which mark the systematic transitions in the Mohawk language, though by no means peculiar to it, cannot fail to awaken an interest in the thoughtful student, who reflects on the social condition of the people among whom this elaborated vehicle of thought was the constraining power by means of which their chiefs and elders swayed the nations of the Iroquois confederacy with an eloquence more powerful and persuasive than that of many civilised nations. They have been illustrated in the verb; but the same systematic application of euphonic change through all the transitions of their vocabulary is seen in the elaborate word-sentences, so characteristic of the extreme length to which the incorporating mode of structure of the Turanian family of languages is carried in many of those spoken by the American nations. The habitual concentration of complex ideas in a single word has long been recognised, not only as giving a peculiar character to many of the Indian languages, but as one source of their adaptability to the aims of native oratory. From the Massachusetts Bible of Eliot, Professor Whitney quotes a word of eleven syllables; and Gallatin produces from the Cherokee another of seventeen syllables. This frequently embodies a descriptive holophrasm, and so aids the native rendering of novel objects and ideas into a language, the vocabulary of which is necessarily devoid of the requisite terms. But in such cases the agglutinative process is obvious, and the elements of the compounded word must be present to the mind of speaker and hearer. The English word “almighty” is itself an example of the process. It becomes in the Mohawk Prayer-Book _seshatsteaghseragwekonh_, from _seshatsteh_, “you are strong,” and _ahkwekonh_, “all,” or “the whole.” When the missionaries first undertook to render into the Mohawk language the Gospels and Service-Books for Christian worship, it may be doubted if many of their converts had ever seen a sheep. But they had to reproduce in Mohawk this general confession: “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep.” They did it accordingly in this fashion: _Teyagwaderyeadawearyesneoni yoegwathaharagwaghtha tsisahate tsiniyouht yodiyadaghtoeouh teyodinakaroetoeha_, which may be literally rendered: “We make a mistake, and get off the track where your road is, the same as strayed animals with small horns.” The extreme literalness of the rendering may probably strike the mind of the English reader in a way that would not occur to the Indian, familiar with such descriptive holophrasms. But it illustrates a difficulty with which Eliot was very familiar when engaged on his Massachusetts Indian Bible. In translating, for example, the song of Deborah and Barak, where the mother of Sisera “cried through the lattice,” the good missionary looked in vain in the Indian wigwam for anything that corresponded to the term. At length he called an Indian and described to him a lattice as wicker-work, and obtained in response a rendering of the text which literally meant: “The mother of Sisera looked through an eel-pot.” It was the only kind of wicker-work of which the Indian had any knowledge.