1S96.] 4dO [BriiUOD. 



means to extead liis parochial duties very far ; so that a chieftain of this 

 very tribe went over to the Bishop of Havana in 1668 and asked for an 

 additional priest. We have the record of that journey. He sent over 

 with this messenger a written description of what he wanted, not writ- 

 ten in the Spanish nor in Latin letters, but in characters which they 

 were accustomed to use, somewhat similar, probably, to those four 

 speech-words which Mr. Gushing has shown us to-night on one of these 

 illustrations, some form of hieroglyph. 



Now, liow can we get at the evidence as to who these people were? 

 We found, in the first place, the earliest discoverers meeting with tribes 

 who lived upon mounds made in the manner described. They arp not 

 depicted in full ; but the fact tliat they were mound-builders and 

 mound-dwellers leads us to suppose that they might have extended to 

 the Florida keys and also the Ten Thousand Islands on the southwes- 

 tern coast. We have, I take it, the means to a solution through our 

 linguistic studies. Hernando d'Escalante Fontaneda (the Spaniard 

 whom I spoke of, who lived between 1550 to 1560 some five or six 

 years in this very locality) has left us in his memoir some fifty or sixty 

 names of the native towns, villages, chiefs and peoples. They have 

 been very carefully examined by Mr. Buckingham Smith, with the aid 

 of Mr. Pitchlyn (a native Choctaw), and they have, I consider, been 

 practically identified by him as belonging to the Choctaw group of dia- 

 lects. He has, it appears to me, sufficiently shown this. I will give 

 you two examples out of a number Fontaneda tells us that one of the 

 villages was called Cuchij'aga, which he translated "The Town of 

 Weeping." Now Mr. Pitchlyn says this means in Choctaw literally, 

 " Where we are going to weep." He gives us the name of the king, 

 Caloosa. There is no doubt that is a Choctaw word. Fontaneda says 

 that it means brave, or fierce, or cruel ; Pitchlyn says Caloosa means 

 "the brave black man," "the brave dark-colored man," dark or black 

 being also the symbol for bravery, boldness, ferocity. We have, there- 

 fore, these two words, the meanings of which are given by Fontaneda, 

 and which Pitchlyn says are good Choctaw to-day. I take it, there- 

 fore, that there is a very strong supposition that the inhabitants of south- 

 western Florida spoke a Choctaw dialect. 



It is somewhat remarkable that we do not find any French or any 

 Spanish early accounts, giving traces of the Choctaw in the vicinity of 

 the lower St. Johns. That region was populated by an entirely differ- 

 ent linguistic stock and people, the Timucuas. Their language has no 

 similarity to any other, either in the Northern or Southern continent. It 

 is absolutely extinct and was a century ago ; but we have, fortunately, 

 one grammar and a confessional in it, which have been lately published 

 by the diligence of several eminent French scholars. We do not find 

 the Timuquanan words on the west coast of Florida, except in the 

 vicinity of Cedar Keys considerably to the north of the localit}- spoken 

 of to-night. 



PROC. AMEI5. PHILOS. SOC. XXXV. 153. 3c. PRINTED AUGUST 10, 1897. 



