ds of
geographical names all over our land. In the State of Connecticut alone
there are over six hundred, and even more in Pennsylvania.

Certainly it would be a most legitimate anxiety which should direct
itself to the preservation of the correct forms and precise meanings of
these numerous and peculiarly national designations. One would think
that this alone would not fail to excite something more than a languid
curiosity in American linguistics, at least in our institutions of
learning and societies for historical research.

Such a motive applies to the future as well as to the past. We have yet
thousands of names to affix to localities, ships, cars, country-seats,
and the like. Why should we fall back on the dreary repetition of the
Old World nomenclature? I turn to a Gazetteer of the United States, and
I find the name Athens repeated 34 times to as many villages and towns
in our land, Rome and Palmyra each 29 times, Troy 58 times, not to speak
of Washington, which is entered for 331 different places in this
Gazetteer!

What poverty of invention does this manifest!

Evidently the forefathers of our christened West were, like Sir John
Falstaff, at a loss where a commodity of good names was to be had.

Yet it lay immediately at their hands. The native tongues supply an
inexhaustible store of sonorous, appropriate, and unused names. As has
well been said by an earlier writer, "No class of terms could be applied
more expressive and more American. The titles of the Old World certainly
need not be copied, when those that are fresh and fragrant with our
natal soil await adoption."[1]

That this study has received so slight attention I attribute to the
comparatively recent understanding of the value of the study of
languages in general, and more particularly to the fact that no one, so
far as I know, has set forth the purposes for which we should
investigate these tongues, and the results which we expect to reach by
means of them. This it is my present purpose to attempt, so far as it
can be accomplished in the scope of an evening address.

The time has not long passed when the only good reasons for studying a
language were held to be either that we might thereby acquaint ourselves
with its literature; or that certain business, trading, or political
interests might be subserved; or that the nation speaking it might be
made acquainted with the blessings of civilization and Christianity.
These were all good and suffic