Poesten Kill, the name of a stream and of a town in Rensselaer County, is entered in deed to Van Rensselaer in 1630, "Petanac, the mill stream" ; in other records, ''Petanac, the Molen Kil," and "De Laet's Marlen Kil and Waterval." Petanac, the Indian name, is an equivalent of Stockbridge Patternac, which King Ninham, in an affidavit, in 1762, declared meant "A fall of water, and nothing more." "Molen Kil" (Dutch), means "mill water." De Laet's Marlen Kil ende Waterval," locates the name as that of a wellknown waterfall on the stream of eighty feet. Weise, in his " History of Troy," wrote : "Having erected a saw-mill upon the kill for sawing posts and timber, which was known thereafter as Poesten

* "The Indians frequently designated places by the names of esculent or medicinal roots which were there produced. In the Algonquin language the generic names for tubers was pett, varying in some dialects to pin, pena, pon, or hurt. This name seems originally to have belonged to the common ground nut : Apias tuberosa. Abnaki, pen, plural, penak. Other species were designated by prefixes to this generic, and, in the compositions of place names, was employed to denote locality {auk, auki, ock, etc.), or by an abundance verb (kanti-kadi) . Thus p'sai-pen, 'wild onions,' with the suffix for place, ock, gave p'sai-p en-auk, or as written by the Dutch, Passapenock, .387.)Indian name for Beeren Island." (J. H. Trumbull, Mag. of Am. Hist i, the

NAMES ON THE EAST FROM MANHATTAN NORTH, 6;^