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oIbrechts] the swimmer MANUSCRIPT 3
course, not possible to say which place was taken in this sequence by
the formulas which had been discarded by Mooney,
Another fact to which attention should be called is that this manuscript
contains 13 formulas which were obtained by Ay. from another
medicine man, i;'tlan9''°D8, who had died when Mooney started
working on the manuscript. Ay. himself was unable to give Mr.
Mooney much information on these formulas and the data we have
on them have mainly to be gathered by analogy with what we loiow
of the other formulas. This i;'tlan9*''^D8 must have been rather
generous with his knowledge, as this collection of formulas is also
found in the compilation of wJno'ti' (Ms. II), ^° another of the reputed
medicine men of Ay.'s time.
So as to be able to complete the work on the manuscript with the
best results possible the following method was adopted:
The original manuscript having been lost, Mooney's transliteration
was taken along when I went on the Cherokee field trip. After con-
tacts were made with the people, and especially with some of the
more prominent medicine men, efforts were made to acquire a sound
knowledge of Cherokee phonetics, as well as pronunciative facilities.
The transliteration of Mooney was then read aloud to a medicine
man, who wrote the text in the Sequoya syllabary. This text was
then read aloud by the medicine man and was taken down phoneti-
cally by me. On this latter text the work was done.
This may seem to be a very artificial way of reconstituting the
text but I can vouch for its accuracy. Until the original manuscript
comes to light again—which I sincerely hope it will—there is only
one proof to test the accuracy of the texts acquired in this way:
Mooney, in his SFC, gives an illustration (PL xxvi) of a page of the
Ay. manuscript (Formula 29) ; with this illustration the text obtained
by me was compared after I came back to Washington and it was
found that there were no real discrepancies. The two texts are given
on opposite pages. (Pis. 2 and 3.)
From a careful investigation of them, and after due allowance is
made for the variants resulting from the difference between the
magistral, calligraphic writing of Ay. in the one, and the current,
ahnost stenograpliic scribble of my informant (W.) in the other, it
appears that there is really no discrepancy that could in any way
interfere with the meaning. Such differences as there seemingly
are, are merely matters of orthography, or show that one individual
is more slave to "sandhi" laws than the other. The words that
1° In the course of this paper the manuscript here edited will usually be referred
to by an abbreviation: the Ay. Ms. By Ms. II, I refer to Wtlno'ti's manuscript,
which will soon be ready for publication; and by Ms. Ill to a manuscript by the
latter's father, Ga'DtGwana*'sti.