72 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



the coast belt. An interesting part of the argument was 

 that the Iroquois proper had not, prior to their being armed 

 with guns in 1640, subdued other tribes, and that only after 

 receiving those arms from the Dutch and English they des- 

 olated the country southward as far as the Tuscaroras, when 

 their attention was diverted to the Illinois and to wars with 

 the French in Canada. This southern invasion of the Five 

 Nations depopulated the belt of country before mentioned, 

 that was before, and at the time of Smith, occupied by the 

 Massawomekes, which the paper further identified with the 

 Eries. 



TWENTY-FOURTH REGULAR MEETING. 



May 18, 1880. 



Dumbarton Aboriginal Soapstone Quarry. 



By E. R. REYNOLDS. 



No Paper Furnished. 



The Testimony of the Romance Languages concerning 

 the Forms of the Imperfect and Pluperfect Subjunc- 

 tive in the Roman Folk-Speech. 



By E. A. FAY. 



Assuming, as the present state of philological science justi- 

 fies us in doing, that the so-called Romance languages are sim- 

 ply the natural development of the old Roman folk-speech — 

 which was unwritten, and concerning which we know 

 scarcely anything — the purpose of the paper is to inquire 

 what these languages have to tell us concerning one of its 

 features, viz., its forms of the Imperfect and Pluperfect Sub- 

 junctive as compared with the forms of those tenses in the 

 classical or literary language. 



As the Romance languages afford no trace whatever of the 



