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ceptible.
Their manners and institutions, as well as
their organization, had a common physiognomy; and, before their languages began to be known, there was no safe method of grouping the nations into families.
But when the vast variety of dialects came to be com-
pared, there were found east of the
Mississippi not more than eight radically distinct languages, of which five still constitute the speech of powerful communities, and three are known only as memorials of tribes that have almost disappeared from the earth.
I. The primitive language which was the most widely diffused, and the most fertile in dialects, received from the
French the name of Algonquin.
It was the mother tongue of those who greeted the colonists of
Raleigh at
Roanoke, of those who welcomed the Pilgrims to
Plymouth.
It was heard from the
Bay of Gaspe to the
valley of the Des Moines; from
Cape Fear, and, it may be, from the
Savannah, to the land of the Esquimaux; from the
Cumberland River of
Kentucky to the southern bank of the Missinipi.
It was spoken, though not exclusively, in a territory that extended through sixty degrees of longitude, and more than twenty degrees of latitude.
The
Micmacs, who occupied the east of the continent, south of the little tribe that dwelt round the
Bay of Gaspe, holding possession of
Nova Scotia and the
adjacent isles, and probably never much exceeding three thousand in number, were known to our fathers only as the active allies of the
French.
They often invaded, but never inhabited,
New England.
The
Etchemins, or Canoemen, dwelt not only on the
St. John's River, the Ouygondy of the natives,
but on the
St. Croix, which
Champlain always called from their name, and extended as far west, at least, as
Mount Desert.
