The Indians vanished from Westchester as noiselessly as the morning mists disappear before the advancing day, inclosed valleys and hidden nooks retaining remnants after the great body had gone. They left behind them so few material evidences of their existence here that we find them only by accident or by careful search. But many of the names applied by them to mountains, streams and localities have been fortunately retained by the white settlers and their descendants, and in their associations and appropriateness add an interesting variety to our local nomenclature.

THE DISCOVERY AND SETTLEilEXT OF ■WESTCHES- TER COUNTY.

BY JAMES WOOD, A.M. President of the Westchester County Historical Society.

Europeans first came to the section of country now known as Westchester County in the vain endeavor to find an easy sea-way to India and Cathay that received so much of the attention of maritime nations in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The wealth of those far-distant lands had for many ages been borne by slow caravans across the wear}^ stretches of Central and Southern Asia, and had built prosperous cities wherever their rich spices and costly fabrics and precious jewels had found a trading-place. These visible realities had been supplemented by extravagant fables of the riches of the East, until the minds of navigators were inflamed with an eager desire to reach these inexhaustible treasures and bring them quickly home in their ships of the sea, instead of upon the "ships of the desert," as they had so slowly come before. This desire led to great events. It developed navigation into a science. It took the Portuguese around the southern extremity of Africa, to which they gave its auspicious name, because it furnished a good hope of reaching India by sea. It brought Columbus across the Atlantic to discover a new world.