Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/130

Rh types of civilization—oriental and occidental—and by doing so to bring forth a new type of civilization, in which the culture and science of the two hemispheres will meet, not in conflict, but in harmony, so as to enable us to share the inheritance of Christian religion, oriental philosophy, Greek art, Roman law, and modern science.

Thus we hope in the course of the twentieth century to have at least one fruit out of our earnest and persevering efforts to contribute to the progress of mankind.

HE geographical names of a country tell much of its history. Each race that inhabits a region gives its own names to mountains, rivers, and lakes, or adopts names previously given. A stronger people may, in later centuries, destroy or drive out every member of the earlier race. The latter may hand down no written sentence of its own history, yet some record of the race will be preserved in the geographical names which survive. The Romans were not able to vanquish the Britons. Comparatively little of Roman civilization penetrated the British Isles. The fact that the Roman "conquest" was little more than a military occupancy is attested by the geographic names which the Romans left, most of which terminate in -caster or -Chester, from the Roman military word castra, a camp. Each wave of invasion—Roman, Angle, Danish, Saxon, or Norman—left its story in the names which it gave, and which remain like the stranded boulders of a glacier long since melted away.

The varied history through which different sections of the United States have passed is told in the varied nature of its geographic names. The red man built no cities in whose ruins we may read the story of his past, for the Indian was not a builder. He has left no roads or fortresses or castles; his methods of warfare called rather for a forest trail and an ambuscade, and these leave no ruins. Were a traveler to examine every valley and hill, every pass and ford and mountain from Maine to Florida, he would now find few traces of the red man in any material thing which survives him. But on every hand he would find the record of Indian occupancy in the names of rivers, creeks, and lakes in which the red man fished and on whose shores he camped and hunted and warred. The mountains seem to have had little attraction for the Indian, and it is seldom that a mountain bears an Indian name. The red man cared little for the bays and inlets along the coast; he made little use of the offshore islands; hence it is that among the hundreds of local names given to islands and bays along the coast of America one seldom meets an Indian word. But the streams and lakes were the Indian's delight. On their surfaces or along their banks most of his time was spent. Along their sides ran his trails and on their shores stood his villages. Every considerable stream and every lake had its name. When the pale face came he found the lake and the stream already named. When he traded