In this work special effort has been made, first, to ascertain the places to which the names belonged as given in official records, to ascertain the physical features of those places, and carry back the thought to the poetic period of our territorial history, " when the original drapery in which nature was enveloped under the dominion of the laws of vegetation, spread out in one vast, continuous interminable forest," broken here and there by the opened patches of cornlands and the wigwams and villages of the redmen ; secondly, to ascertain the meanings of the aboriginal names, recognizing fully that, as Dr. Trumbull wrote, " They were not proper names or mere unmeaning marks, but significant appellatives conveying a description of the locatives to which they were given." Coming down to us in the crude orthographies of traders and unlettered men, they are not readily recognized in the orthographies of the educated missionaries, and especially are they disguised by the varying powers of the German, the French, and the English alphabets in which they were written by educated as well as by uneducated scribes, and by traders who were certainly not very familiar with the science of representing spoken sounds by letters. In one instance the same name appears in forty-nine forms by different writers. Many names, however, 'have been recognized under miss'ionary standards and their meanings satisfactorily ascertained, aided by the features of the localities to which they were applied ; the latter, indeed, con-

4 INDIAN GEOGUArillCAL NAMES.