About the head of steam-navigation on the Illinois, and especially near the junction of the canal which will connect the lakes with the Mississippi, cities multiply prodigiously, and are called by the most prodigious names. Most assuredly my countrymen are great at christening places; but still I wish they would consult Tristram Shandy, where they will find a most edifying discussion on the subject. The race of antiquaries who grope their way backward through the obscure labyrinth of time by the clue of names, will assuredly be not a little puzzled, as children are wont to be, to find out who was the father of Zebedee’s children. If they should follow the etymology of names, they will probably come to the conclusion that we derived our parentage from all the nations of the earth, ancient and modern, and had more fathers than children. Nevertheless I have nothing to say against any of the thriving brood of young cities that multiplied so wonderfully in those happy days when swallows built in young men’s whiskers, and the little hatchet became a great hammer before the iron grew cold. Those especially that have either houses or inhabitants, I wish all possible prosperity, and hope they will one day rival the great cities after which they are christened. But those which have nothing but a name and a lithographic map to demonstrate their existence, cannot expect to be recognized by any traveler of ordinary pretensions to veracity. The commencement of the canal to which allusion has just been made, was the signal for speculation in its immediate vicinity, and six cities were forthwith founded on the prairie between La Salle and Ottawa, a distance of some fourteen miles. As they may possibly perish in embryo before their birth, and thus dodge the antiquary who will be looking for them some centuries hence, I feel it a duty to do all I can to assist his inquiries, lest he should lose his wits in searching for them, as did the pedagogue in Le Sage, in looking for the _paulo post futurum_ of a Greek verb.