rilE ABORIGINES. 



/D 



corn, came from southern seed. Whether in these seven 

 thousand years there may have been more than one dis- 

 tinct race of people spreading over this region is quite 

 beyond the power of archaeologists, at present, to deter- 

 mine. C. C. Willoughby, of Harvard Museum, whose 

 recent discoveries of extremely ancient burial mounds in 

 Maine have given him valuable scientific data, suspects 

 the existence of a race more primitive than the Algon- 

 quins and preceding them. 



But the Algonquin Indians, who were the one dominat- 

 ing family of Indian tribes when white settlements began, 

 had spread from Virginia to Labrador, and from the At- 

 lantic to the Mississippi River. Their language is the 

 basis of dozens of the various dialects in those regions. 

 Take, for example, the word " Mississippi," meaning Great 

 Water, the first part, Missi, meaning Great, is identical 

 in essence with the first root of Massachusetts, meaning 

 Great Hills,* and the last part, ippi, meaning Water, is 

 seen in the name of our neighboring pond, called Assi- 

 nippi. Rocky Water. 



These words at these far distant extremities of the Al- 

 gonquin nation are enough to illustrate the spread and 

 the variation in the one dominant tongue. How long it 

 must have taken for this nation of red men to have spread 

 itself and its language over so broad an area is a matter 

 of guesswork. The Greek nation had a written language, 

 and an enterprise vastly superior to anything seen among 

 the Algonquin tribes, and it took them, perhaps, two thou- 

 sand years to spread their dialect half as broadly. 



If four or five thousand years are a fair estimate for 

 the age of the Algonquin language, our original name of 



* Dr. H. M. Dexter, in Lib. of New England Hist., I, 124, Ed. 1865, 4, says 

 that Massachusetts means " a hill in the form of an arrow's head ; " but it means 

 more than that. Any sharp hill was an " adchus," but a large one was a " massa " 

 "adchus " ; while a place of large hills was indicated by an " at " or " ut " ending'. 

 " Massa "" adchus "" ut," therefore, referred to the region about the Blue Hills, 

 where the tribe so named inhabited. 



