A NOTE ON THE ETYMON OF ONTARIO. 607 



Entouhonorons," — Lake of the Entouhonorons. Champlain, also, in 

 his account of his Expedition witii the Wyandots against the Iroquois, 

 calls it " The Great Lake of the Entouhonorons." 



Now who were these ? They were one of the celebrated " Five 

 Nations " inhabiting the region between Lake Ontario and the New 

 England States — the well-known league of tribes called by the French 

 " Iroquois," — not by the satirical use, this time, of a French term, but 

 by the manufacture of a word out of native materials, — from hiro, 

 dixi, " I have said," and ko\ie, a French effort to express the favorite 

 formula of assent, given more at large in Hiawatha, as "hi-au-ha!" 



The Entouhonorons are better known to us as the Senecas. How 

 it happened that a portion of the sons of our far western forests came 

 to possess a name identical with that of the Emperor Nero's res- 

 pectable tutor, xised at one time to be a mystery to nie ; and its 

 solution, when I discovered it, gave me great delight. The origin of 

 the term I found to be this : — the termination eca — variously written 

 eca, aca, aga, equa, — according to Pownall, — a learned philological 

 Governor, in succession, of New York, Massachusetts, and South 

 Carolina, about a hundred years ago, (1753-1) — denotes a tribe or 

 people : and sen has the meaning of farther. Hence Seneca signifies 

 "the farther nation," without stating their name. In like manner 

 the familiar term Mohawk has, according to the same authority, the 

 meaning of "the hither or nearer nation" — the particle tno ov ma 

 having the sense of hitherward, hithermost, — the actual name of these 

 Mo-acs, Mo-ages, Ma-quas, &c., being Ka-ying-e-ha-aga, " the people 

 that are at the head of men," — a name compressed by the French 

 into Agniers. "Hither" and "farther" are here used relatively, of 

 course, to New England. 



The real name of the Senecas or "Farther Tribe," as given on the 

 southern or Iroquois side of the lake, was Nundowauya or Nundawa- 

 ono, " the-great-hill-people," from a hill at the head of Lake Canan- 

 daigua, where was their original settlement, (Morgan, 51.) But on 

 the northern or Wyandot side they were known as the Entouho7iorons, 

 Sonnontouans, &c., terms by which perhaps a similar sense may be 

 conveyed, as we know that in the Algonquin dialect, Onnontio = 

 Montmagny = Great Mountain. On Champlain's map the Seneca 

 District is marked as occupied by the Antouhoyiorons, and in du 

 Creux's by the Ondieronii and Sonnomonenii. In Ondieronii we may 



