one from Whitehall to St. Johns, by Lake Champlain; one from Quebec to Montreal.

In this route, I have become acquainted with the most interesting part of the State. There are four more which I would wish to take, and which would render my knowledge of it complete :

1. From Albany to Black River, and thence down the St. Lawrence, returning through the northern counties by Lake Champlain.

2. By the Great Western Turnpike to Buffalo, and on the south shore of Lake Erie to Pittsburgh, etc.

3. By Cattskill turnpike to Oxford, from thence to Owego and down the Susquehannah.

4. By Delaware and Kingston turnpike in the interior, and returning by the Newburgh turnpike.

Omissions. Vegetable Productions. There are six different kinds of wild plums in the western country, which come to maturity at different times. Some are large and others small; some are very fine.

The Tamerick-tree is the only species of deciduous pine in this country. It is a very fme ornamental-tree.

On the Ridge Road, about sixteen or seventeen miles from Lewiston, we saw a black-walnut, which we estimated to be six feet in diameter.

The cuttings of Nasturtium, put in a bottle of water, luxuriate very handsomely.

Silver-Pine is a fine tree for planting, and so is the whitepine. The former can be procured at Livingston's Nursery, Westchester county.

It is said that Le Rey de Chaumont, of Jefferson county, has sold 3,000 trees, standing, to the British Government, for five dollars a-piece.

Mineral Productions. Excellent black sand, the principal ingredient of which is iron, can be procured at the Little Falls, and on the shore of Lake Erie.

Seneca oil is procured from a spring at Olean, on the Alleghany River, by dipping a blanket on the surface, which attracts the oil, and then brushing it into a receiver.

Col. Porter says that he saw a single specimen of copper from Lake Superior, weighing twenty pounds. The thunder on the bay of that name, on Lake Huron, is supposed to arise from immense beds of iron.

There is a quarry of gypsum in Camillus. This manure does not answer in argillareous or calcareous soils. It is excellent in sandy soils, in pine-barrens. Two-thirds of the Camillus gypsum is dark gray.

An inexhaustible quarry of gypsum has been discovered in Sullivan, Madison county, but a few feet below the surface. The greater part is of the gray kind; but there are some veins of the transparent.

There is a sulphur-spring in Genesee county.

The celebrated oil-stones are found on Buffalo creek.

The Iroquois.

ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, DEC. 6, 1811.

Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Historical Society:

THERE is a strong propensity in the human mind to trace up our ancestry to as high and as remote a source as possible; and if our pride and our ambition cannot be gratified by a real statement of facts, fable is substituted for truth, and the imagination is taxed to supply the deficiency. This principle of our nature, although liable to great perversion, and frequently the source of well-founded ridicule, may, if rightly directed, become the parent of great actions. The origin and progress of individuals, of families, and of nations, constitute Biography and History-two of the most interesting departments of human knowledge. Allied to this principle, springing from the same causes, and producing the same benign effects, is that curiosity we feel in tracing the history of the nations which have occupied the same territory before us, although not connected with us in any other respect. "To abstract the mind from all local emotion," says an eminent moralist, "would be impossible if it were endeavored, and it would be foolish if it were possible.' The places where great

* Johnson's Tour to the Hebrides.

events have been performed, where great virtues have been exhibited, where great crimes have been perpetrated, will always excite kindred emotions of admiration or horror. And if "that man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plains of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona," we may, with equal confidence assert, that morbid must be his sensibility, and small must be his capacity for improvement, who does not advance in wisdom and in virtue from contemplating the state and the history of the people who occupied this country before the man of Europe.

As it is, therefore, not uninteresting, and is entirely suitable to this occasion, I shall present a general geographical, political, and historical view of the red men who inhabited this State before us; and this I do the more willingly, from a conviction that no part of America contained a people which will furnish more interesting information and more useful instruction; which will display the energies of the human character in a more conspicuous manner, whether in light or in shade, in the exhibition of great virtues and talents, or of great vices and effects.

In 1774 the government of Connecticut, in an official statement to the British Secretary of State, represented the original title to the lands of Connecticut as in the Pequot Nations of Indians, who were numerous and warlike; that their great sachem Sasacus had under him twenty-six sachems, and that their territory extended from Narraganset to Hudson's River, and over all Long Island.* The Long Island Indians, who are represented as very savage and ferocious, were called Meilowacks, or Meito

* Collections of Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 7, P. 231.

wacks, and the Island itself Meitowacks." The Mohiccons, Mahatons, or Manhattans, occupied this Island and Staten Island. The Mohegans, whose original name was Muhhekanew, were settled on that part of the State east of Hudson's River and below Albany, and those Indians on the west bank from its mouth to the Kaats' Kill mountains, were sometimes denominated Wabinga, and sometimes Sankikani, and they and the Mohegans went by the general appellation of River Indians; or, according to the Dutch, Mohickanders. Whether the Mohegans were a distinct nation from the Pequots§ has been recently doubted; although they were formerly so considered. One of the early historians asserts that the Narragansets, a powerful nation in New England, held dominion over part of Long Island. The generic name adopted by the French for all the Indians of New England, was Abenaquis; and the country from the head of Chesapeake Bay to the Kittatinney mountains, as far eastward as the Abenaquis, and as far northward and westward as the Iro

* Smith's History of New York, p. 262.

+ Staten Island was purchased from the Indians by Col. Lovelace, second governor under the Duke of York, between the years 1667 and 1673. (Chalmers's Political Annals of the Colonies, p. 509.) He refers to different manuscripts in the Plantation Office, called New York Entries, New York Papers, which appear to be voluminous. If we could ascertain from those papers the nation that sold Staten Island, it might produce some interesting inferences.

Jefferson's Virginia, p. 310. Collections of New York Historical Society, vol. 1, p. 33, 34. Barton's Views of the Origin of the Indians, p. 31. Trumbull's History of the United States, p. 42. Trumbull's History of Connecticut, p. 28.

|| Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 1, p. 144, &c. Daniel Gookins.