[ganong] INDIAN PLACE- NOMENCLATURE 379 



or THEIR, though it is extinguished from the combination if 

 the preceding word ends in O or 00. The remainder of the 

 combination, the -KA'DI-, is the most important part, and it 

 has been differently interpreted in the various writings upon 

 the subject. It is most commonly stated to mean PLENTY 

 or ABUNDANCE, of the object described by the prefix, so 

 that SHUBENACADIE, for instance, would mean PLENTY OF 

 GROUND NUTS, and PASSAMAQUODDY would mean PLENTY 

 OF POLLOCK. This idea seems to have originated with Dawson, 

 or at least was given its wide currency by him through his influential 

 work Acadian Geology, often mentioned in the following pages, and it 

 has the benefit of the advocacy of no less an authority than J. Ham- 

 mond Trumbull, in his foundational work cited often in the following 

 pages, (e.g. page 391). Nevertheless, the evidence seems to me to 

 show that this idea is not quite correct. In the first place, many of the 

 names with the-ACA'DIE or-AKA'DIK termination have a signi- 

 ficance not so much of PLENTY as of OCCURRENCE, such as in 

 AGLASEAWACADIE, meaning AN ENGLISH SETTLEMENT, 

 where the idea obviously is not the plentifulness of the Englishmen, 

 but their occurrence or presence at a certain place. Furthermore, a 

 comparison of the meanings of the entire series of names will show that 

 uniformly this idea of PRESENCE or OCCURRENCE is -in them all, 

 while the idea of PLENTY is secondary if present at all. In the second 

 place, Rand, our best authority, in his interpretations of the word, 

 never has prominent the idea of PLENTY, but always of PRESENCE 

 or OCCURRENCE. Furthermore, Father Pacifique, the leading 

 scholar in Micmac of the present day, in his Micmac Almanac of 1902, 

 has used this same termination, which he writes -EGATIG, in many 

 cases where only the idea of PRESENCE, not of PLENTY is involved, 

 and most strikingly of all in places named for the Saints of the Church, 

 e.g., PELNALEGATIG, meaning St. Bernard's (the Indian L 

 replacing, as usual, the English R). In the third place, the Indians 

 themselves then interpreting these words, so not make prominent the 

 idea of plenty, but only that of the occurrence there of something. 

 It means "where you get them," my note-book records that a Maliseet 

 Indian once told me; it "Means — where you find 'em," said Captain 

 Campbell Hardy's Micmac, as noted in a work in connection with 

 Shubenacadie following. This point as to the exact significance of the 

 root was argued very clearly and conclusively by James Vroom, with 

 an illustrative list of twenty-two names, in one of his all too rare writ- 

 ings, in the Educational Review (St. John), VI, 1892, 9. Gathering 

 all of the evidence together, it seems to me quite clear that the primary 

 significance of the root -KA'DI- is that of PRESENCE or OCCUR- 



