tinent, and sedulous to preserve the only traces likely to remain of the aborigines whom we have dispossessed, to interest ourselves in arresting the tide of boundless monotony of nomenclature, which is sweeping over the land. We should take pride enough in our country to save what we can of it from further desecration, remembering what a heritage is ours of a continent stretching from ocean to ocean, whose flag floats thousands of miles further than the Roman eagles ever flew.

Names of places are very rarely created. They are prepon. derantly borrowed from foreign countries, or else transplanted from the older settlements to new regions. Some (but unhappily they are comparatively few) are expressions of some inherent quality, association, or historical event. What names, for example, can be at once more appropriate and more euphonious than Sierra Nevada, or Blue Ridge, or Rocky Mountains? No doubt all proper names had originally a peculiar and appropriate meaning. Multitudes of towns and villages, as well as estates, have been named from early owners or residents. This is evinced in the everywhere-found affixes to family names like town, ton, ville, burg, and borough, which form such countless combinations in the local nomenclature of every State in the Union.

The new world, so far as its nomenclature is concerned, may fairly be termed for the most part but a renaissance of the old. Take out of the map of most of our States all names of foreign derivation (including, of course, the British) and surprisingly few native names will remain. Names which were fossilized on the banks of the Euphrates and the Jordan three thousand years ago are found on the banks of the Susquehanna and the Mississippi to-day.

Some of our early nomenclators appear to have thought that the farther they could fetch a name from remote antiquity, the better it would sound. New York State, especially, suffered from the classic craze in the person of a surveyor-general named De Witt, who was enamored of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." So he baptized a multitude of towns with the names of ancient cities, and not content with that, hitched to others the names of Greek and Roman poets, philosophers, and statesmen, about as appropri ate to New York villages as would be a sculpture of Romulus and Remus in the Capitol at Washington. The banks of the Genesee and the Mohawk, instead of being permanently

adorned with the beautiful indigenous names abounding in that region, were made to echo ancient history as old and as dead as Julius Cæsar. The misfortune followed (as all bad models always have hosts of imitators) that the classic epidemic spread, until we have among American towns 5 Ciceros, 3 Tullys, 6 Catos, 7 Ovids, 6 Virgils, 9 Horaces, 10 Milos, 7 Hectors, 7 Solons, 10 Platos. 15 Homers, and 4 Scipios.

From classical geography we have borrowed without rhyme or reason 16 Uticas, 20 Romes, 5 Marathons, 19 Spartas, 9 Atticas, 5 Ithacas, 8 Delphis, 18 Athenses, 13 Corinths, and 25 Troys. Fabulous mythology contributes to our local nomenclature 7 Neptunes, 8 Minervas, 3 Jupiters, 5 Junos, 5 Ulysseses, 4 Dianas, 22 Auroras, and only 1 Apollo.

But the Greek and Roman hobby, though well ridden, yields to scriptural geography in the number, if not in the variety of borrowed appellations for places. The leaven of Biblical lore lay profoundly working in the souls of many early settlers all through the North and South. So we have (among many more) 22 Bethels, 10 Jordans, 9 Jerichos, 14 Bethlehems, 22 Goshens, 21 Shilohs, 11 Carmels, 18 Tabors and Mount Tabors, 23 Zions and Mount Zions, 26 Edens, 30 Lebanons, 26 Hebrons, and 36 Sharons, and compounds.

From the local nomenclatures of other countries of the East we have not borrowed largely. Still, we have 11 Egypts, 14 Cairos, 15 Alexandrias, 5 Bagdads, 11 Damascuses, 19 Palmyras, 14 Carthages, 9 Memphises, 11 Delhis, 4 Ceylons, 5 Chinas, and 25 Cantons.

The most copious vocabulary of our local names is of British origin. This is readily accounted for by the extensive immigration from that country in the seventeenth century, when the first settlers instinctively took the readiest means of finding names for each new settlement in the wilderness. New England and the southern colonies were thickly sown with appellatives transplanted from England, and at a later period. from Scotland and Ireland. Of American towns duplicating from ten to thirty times over the names of British cities and boroughs, the number is surprisingly large. Taking eighty of the more familiar English cities and towns, we find that these eighty have sufficed to name more than a thousand American places.

As to foreign names other than British, while reduplication is more rare, certain European names have been prime favorites.

While London has but 13 American namesakes, Paris has 22, and Geneva, owing partly to the euphony of the name and partly to its historic associations, has 18. Some European countries are widely duplicated-witness, 17 Denmarks, 12 Norways, and 19 Hollands. Of foreign languages the French is the most widespread in our geography, the French explorations and occupation from 1525 to 1763 having bestowed hosts of names still retained in our states adjacent to Canada, from Maine to Wisconsin, and along the Mississippi from its sources to its mouth, besides the fragmentary survival of Southern Huguenot emigration in such names as Beaufort, Port Royal, etc. Spanish nomenclature is very widely prevalent in New Mexico, California, and other regions adjacent to the Pacific coast, while there is a survival of the former dominion of Spain in the local nomenclature of Florida. The early occupation of New York by natives of Holland has left permanent records in the many Dutch names of streams, localities, and villages in eastern New York and a part of New Jersey.

In more recent years the heavy immigration from Germany has helped to spread German names, though to a very moder ate degree, in the Western States, while a very few Scandinavian names of places are to be found in the Northwest. Switzerland has its little commemoration in Vevay and other names on the banks of the Ohio.

Tracing the origin of the names of our 44 States, we find that 6 are Spanish-California, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Nevada, and Texas; 3 French-Louisiana, Maine, and Vermont; 11 British-Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia; 3 of English manufacture or individual-Indiana, Rhode Island, and Washington; and 21 aboriginal or Indian, viz: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

It is highly creditable to our national taste, as well as to the average good sense of Congress, that so large a number of names native to the soil and appropriate, as well as euphonious, have been preserved in the designations of our States. But it is deplorable that one newly created State should have been admitted as Washington, instead of Takoma, or some

other aboriginal name. It has already created endless annoy. ance and loss in correspondence by its confusion with the capital of the country. What is still more to be regretted is that so few, comparatively, of the great and attractive vocabulary of Indian names have been applied to the naming of new towns throughout the Union. While many rivers and lakes (including happily a large share of the most important) bear aboriginal names, bestowed long before the United States became a nation, and several States (notably New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington) have done themselves honor by calling some of their counties by these handsome names, instead of after so-called statesmen whom nobody remembers, very few towns and villages, even in these States, bear Indian names. Yet witness what a prodigality of fine melodious names remain, the best legacy which the unlettered red man could leave us before he vanished forever before the march of civilization. I can cite but a few-a very few-only, out of hundreds equally eligible.

Wallula, Wyandotte, Winona, Wyoming, Venango, Tioga, Towanda, Tallula, Tuscarora, Toronto, Tallapoosa, Shawnee, Shenandoah, Suwanee, Scioto, Saranac, Sandusky, Seneca, Saginaw, Saratoga, Rappahannock, Roanoke, Pemaquid, Potomac, Ponca, Patapsco, Powhatan, Penobscot, Oswego, Onoko, Ottawa, Osceola, Ontario, Nanticoke, Nottoway, Niagara, Nantucket, Mohegan, Merrimac, Minnehaha, Mackinaw, Muskingum, Meenahga, Minnewaska, Miami, Mohawk, Maumee, Mingo, Lackawanna, Kennebec, Kanawha, Juniata, Hoboken, Hiawatha, Huron, Horicon, Genesee, Erie, Accomac, Allegheny, Alachua, Aroostook, Ampersand, Chesapeake, Catawba, Chippewa, Cayuga, Chenango, and Chicago.

Such names as these roll trippingly off the tongue with liquid harmony. They unite the three leading requisites for good local names-euphony, simplicity, and appropriateness. If it be objected that the etymology of the Indian languages shows all their names to have had merely local application, thus unfitting them for transplanting to other regions, the answer is twofold: First, there is no such advanced stage of knowledge or of agreement among ethnologists versed in the signification of Indian names as can give adequate basis for the assertion; and, second, the transfer to any part of this continent of any aboriginal names whatever is infinitely more logical and appro

priate than the wholesale importation ever going on of foreign appellations representing remote nations, and ages still more remote. Why boggle over a few uncertain Indian etymologies when we have been swallowing for generations the most astounding, incongruous, and inappropriate combinations which the ignorance or the misapplied ingenuity of man could apply to designate our towns?

If it is said that Indian names mean nothing to us, we may reply that neither do the old English names, in nine cases out of ten, mean anything in America. Norfolk and Suffolk, widespread names as they are among us, are not apprehended by Americans, who pronounce them, as meaning North folk and South folk-their primary signification. Nor, even if they were, would they have the slightest applicability to any of the towns and counties they here represent. Is it any more inapposite or misleading to diffuse these aboriginal names over our new States and Territories, than to keep on forever creating the fiftieth Brownsville or the hundredth Johnstown, or the thousandth Jonesboro? How much better would it have been to name New York City, "Manhattan," than to perpetuate in that great metropolis the ignoble name of a graceless royal English duke!

As between names native to the soil, and euphonious in speech, but with only partial fitness, and foreign names with no fitness at all, we may well prefer the former.

One of the most prolific sources from which our names of places have been drawn is the Biographical Dictionary. Beginning with the line of Presidents of the United States, each of whom has from three to thirty-two towns called after his name, we have a long catalogue of statesmen, politicians, military and naval officers, authors, inventors, and men of science who have given names more or less widely distributed. Alexander Hamilton is commemorated by no less than 30 cities or towns, Clinton by 30, Webster by 24, Benton by 20, Calhoun by 13, Clay by 7 (besides many compounds), Quincy by 19, Douglas by 21, and Blaine by 20.

In many cases of places named after minor politicians, we are left to wonder whether the chief object might have been to give to some local celebrity of the hour his sole chance of being remembered at all.

Of all Americans, the illustrious Dr. Franklin has the honor of leading in the choice of his name for places all over the land.