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.

tributing very largely to their interpretation. Probably the reader will find geographical descriptions that do not apply to the places where the name is now met. The early settlers made many transfers as well as extensions of names from a specific place to a large district of country. It must be remembered that original applications were specific to the places which they described even though they were generic and applicable to any place where the same features were referred to. The locatives in Indian deeds and m original patents are the only guide to places of original application, coupled with descriptive features where they are know;i. No vocabularies of the dialects spoken in the lower valley of the Hudson having been preserved, the vocabularies of the Upper- Unami and the M'insi-Lenape, or Delaware tongues on the south and west, and the Natick, or Massachusetts, on the north and east, have been consulted for explanations by comparative inductive methods, and also orthographies in other places, the interpretations of which have been establis;hed by competent linguists.