AMERICAN ABORIGINAL NAMES. 83 



South America has Pachitae ; Georgia has Pachita. Brazil 

 has Paculi, or Pacoolee ; South Carolina has Pacola, or, as it is 

 written in the old French idiom, Pacolet, the final letter silent. 

 Illinois has Peoria, an ancient Indian name of a lake; South 

 America has Piura and Peru; while Louisiana has the bayou 

 name Pero, the French idiom rendering the old word as Perot. 



It is scarcely reasonable to conclude that all these and many 

 more that are known to exist in the way of coincidences, iden- 

 tities, and similarities in the prehistoric water nomenclature of 

 the continent are the result of mere accident, or in conformity 

 to any universal lingual law. The vast array of actual corre- 

 spondences can be accounted for reasonably or properly only on 

 the theory or hypothesis that one common ancestral tongue was 

 known and understood by the race of peoples who overran and 

 colonized the continent in the remote indeterminate past a race 

 of peoples who so fixed their speech in the river names of the 

 Western world that the words have survived through all the 

 mutations of governments, and through all the changes incident 

 to the human tongue in the countless ages that have intervened 

 since the beginning when the words were first applied here to the 

 waters. It is a very singular and striking fact in human history 

 that the names of rivers or other waters have outlived all other 

 evidences of the prehistoric human speech. There are yet in exist- 

 ence the names of the waters of the very primitive home of man 

 itself, when all other evidences of the Adamic age and tongue 

 have been swept into utter oblivion. We know that the names of 

 most of the waters of the Old World have origin in indeterminate 

 eras: the old word-landmarks have been preserved and perpet- 

 uated through the countless changes in nations and tongues 

 since, with no other variations save those incident to the different 

 idioms in the old and the new, our word Nile being the English 

 idiom rendering the Latin Nilus and the Sanskrit Noli. Rhine is 

 the English of the old Rhenus or the older Rina. The ancestral 

 germs in the respective words are easily determined and read in 

 each idiomatic expression. 



We find in great frequency in the prehistoric river names of 

 both North and South America a word or term that is variously 

 written in our geographical literature as augua, agua, aqua, 

 auqua, ogga, occa, and otherwise. Many of the old names have 

 come to us through the early Spanish records, these showing in 

 most instances the Spanish form or idiom in writing the (Spanish) 

 term or word for water or river, augua. But we can not believe, 

 with reason in our favor, that wherever the term appears in the 

 writing of the prehistoric names its presence is wholly due to the 

 Spanish influence on the continent. The term occurs in native 

 names in localities where there is no evidence showing that the 



