a garden vegetable,--with conscious reference, perhaps, to the old
English word _squash_, meaning 'something soft or immature.' Sometimes
etymology overreaches itself, by regarding an aboriginal name as the
corrupt form of a foreign one. Thus the _maskalongé_ or 'great
long-nose' of the St. Lawrence (see p. 43) has been reputed of French
extraction,--_masque elongé_: and _sagackomi_, the northern name of a
plant used as a substitute for or to mix with tobacco,--especially, of
the Bearberry, _Arctostaphylos uva-ursi_,--is resolved into
_sac-à-commis_, "on account of the Hudson's Bay officers carrying it
in bags for smoking," as Sir John Richardson believed (Arctic
Searching Expedition, ii. 303). It was left for the ingenuity of a
Westminster Reviewer to discover that _barbecue_ (denoting, in the
language of the Indians of Guiana, a wooden frame or grille on which
all kinds of flesh and fish were dry-roasted, or cured in smoke,)
might be a corruption of the French _barbe à queue_, i.e. 'from snout
to tail;' a suggestion which appears to have found favor with
lexicographers.]

In Connecticut and Rhode Island special causes operated to corrupt and
transform almost beyond possibility of recognition, many of the Indian
place names. Five different dialects at least were spoken between
Narragansett Bay and the Housatonic River, at the time of the first
coming of the English. In early deeds and conveyances in the colonial
and in local records, we find the same river, lake, tract of land or
bound-mark named sometimes in the Muhhekan, sometimes in the
Narragansett, or Niantic, or Nipmuck, or Connecticut valley, or
Quinnipiac (Quiripee) dialect. The adopted name is often
_extra-limitary_ to the tribe by which it was given. Often, it is a
mixture of, or a sort of compromise between, two dialects; half
Muhhekan, half Narragansett or Nipmuck. In the form in which it comes