It has been found more fertile in dialects than any other aboriginal speech. It was strangely agglutinative, and gave expression to thought by stringing words together into an extended compound. It was the mother-tongue of those who greeted Raleigh's colonists on the Roanoke, of those who boarded the " Half-Moon " on the Hudson, and of those who welcomed and fed the Pilgrims at Plymouth. It was heard from the land of the Esquimo to the Savannah River and from the Bay of Gaspe to the Mississippi.

It is not necessary to investigate the national divisions of the Algonquins further than to .state that the Mohegans occupied the country along the left bank of the Hudson River, called Mahicannittuk, and eastward to the Connecticut, and from Long Island Sound northward to the mouth of the Mohawk, and perhaps to Lake Champlain. Their country was called Laaphawachking. North and west of the Mohegans were the powerful and warlike Iroquois, their immediate neighbors being the Horicans and Mohawks. Across the Hudson, below Catskill, were tribes belonging to the Delaware nation, and east of the Connecticut were the Pequots. Long Island was occupied by Mohegan tribes. It has been stated that at the time of discovery the Mohegans were under military subjection to the Iroquois, and were compelled to pay an annual tribute to them. This is not substantiated by investigation, for we find no reference to it in any of the treaties made by these tribes with the whites, nor was such a thing ever alluded to in all the protracted negotiations between them.