[ganong] INDIAN PLACE-NOMENCLATURE 417 



Other Explanations of the Name. So conclusive seems the evidence for the 

 interpretation of Passamaquoddy given in the preceding pages, and so consistent 

 are all of the data concerned, that it may seem needless to have argued the subject 

 at such length as I have done. Yet I think it worth while in view of the fact that 

 no less than some seven other explanations of the name have been given, while still 

 others are likely in the future to be mined out and displayed by amateur investi- 

 gators of these matters in the first flush of pleasure that is yielded by the discovery 

 of roots which happen to match up into pleasing combinations. Thus it has ever 

 been, and I suppose will be always. 



The first of the other explanations is correct in substance but erroneous in its 

 interpretation of the roots. It seems to have originated in 1840 with a Report 

 made by Mudge and Featherstonhaugh, two Commissioners sent out by the British 

 Government to examine the matter of the International Boundary. In an official 

 British Bluehook of that year they wrote, page 12, "the bay into which the St. 

 Croix empties itself, was known by the Indians of the Morriseet tribe, which still 

 inhabits New Brunswick, by the name of Peskadumquodiah, from Peskadum, Fish, 

 and Quodiah, the name of a fish resembling the cod. The French, according to their 

 usual custon, abbreviated the Indian name, which we sometimes, in the old records, 

 read Quadiac and "Cadie," and at length we find it taking the general designation 

 of 'Acadie' ". And the information is added that the fish resembling the cod is the 

 Pollock, which still continues to frequent that bay. Presumably the Commissioners 

 obtained their information about the origin of Passamaquoddy from the Indians 

 with whom they explored the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick, and probably 

 it was given to them correctly; and their strange error in making the second part of 

 the word, viz., Quodiah, mean Pollock, seems best explainable as some freak of 

 memory, intruded when the matter was written down long after it was learned from 

 the Indians. The error was exposed, very fully, and with the help of Rand the 

 Micmac scholar, by Dawson in 1868, in the second edition of his Acadian Geology, 

 2, 3, and it would have had little importance were it not that it influenced others. 

 Thusrthis seems clearly the foundation of the explanation given in the Collections of 

 the Maine Historical Society, IV, 1856, 191, by C. E. Potter, who derives Passamaquoddy 

 from POS meaning GREAT, ASQUAM meaning WATER, and AQUODDIE 

 meaning POLLOCK or HADDOCK, adding that AQUODDIE "has been frenchified 

 or corrupted into Acadia, Cadia, & Cadie." He expresses the belief that the word 

 applied both to the pollock and the haddock, and remarks that he could not find 

 that the Indians distinguished one from the other. This latter remark could not 

 have been based upon any investigation of the matter, for the least knowledge of the 

 vocabularies, the fish, or the Indians would have shown its error, while so far as I can 

 find, his roots Pos and Asquam have no better basis. This paper of Potter's is typical 

 of the copious superficial literature which seems especially to accompany this subject, 

 and is all the worse from its tone of positivism and prominence of its place of publi- 

 cation, which has caused it to be far more widely quoted and copied than would 

 otherwise have been the case. Thus it was cited by Hind, in his Report on the 

 Geology of New Brunswick, of 1865, 260, who quotes also the earlier Report of 1840 

 (op. cit. 20), and is the origin of the similar error in John Reade's paper in these 

 Transactions, V, 1887, ii, 3. Finally, in no less a work than the Handbook of 

 American Indians (II, 347), the word QUODDY is defined as "A Variety of large 

 herring found in Passamaquoddy bay, ME.! 



A second explanation is correct as to the first part of the word but erroneous 

 as to the latter part and is promulgated by no less distinguished an authority than 

 J. Dyneley Prince, whose writings upon the Indians of this region are both many and 

 valuable. In 1899, he wrote, — "The word Passamaquoddy is a corruption of the 



