The river which Hudson sailed up and down in 1609 has borne many names, given by different peoples at different times. The red men bestow names descriptive or characteristic—while there are no known laws or rules which the white men observe in naming. At the advent of the Europeans to North America many tribes of Indians inhabited the territory from Florida to the St. Lawrence, and back to the Mississippi river, and prominent among them were the Lenapes, to which the Mohicans belonged. These Indians called the river Mah-i-can-i-tuk, meaning “the flowing waters.” The Iroquois called it Co-hat-a-tea, or “river that flows from the mountains.” It was called the Mauritius, in honor of Prince Maurice of Nassau. Rio de Montagne was a name given to it. The French usually called it “Le Grande.” The Spanish called it “The River of the Mountains.” It was often called the “North river” in contradistinction to the “South river”—the Delaware. That Henry Hudson was greatly pleased in exploring this river is not surprising. “There is no river in the western world comparable with it in picturesqueness and beauty, nor has it a superior, if an equal, in these respects, in Europe. In some stretches of the Clyde and the Rhine are features resembling the Hudson, and the Elbe has in sections, such delicately penciled effects, but no European river is so lordly in its bearing, none flows in such state to the sea.” It has been said that no other river in the world presents so great a variety of views as the Hudson. “Throughout its whole length, from the wilderness to the sea, from the Adirondacks to Staten Island, a distance of 325 miles, there is a combination of the finest pictures, illustrating some of the best scenery of the old world,” which some quaint writer (to me unknown) describes as follows: “The tourist with only a slight stretch of the fancy may find Loch Katrine nestled among the mountains of our own Highlands; in the Catskills may be seen from Sunset Mountain of Arran; and in the Palisades, the Giant’s Causeway of Ireland.” He divides the Hudson river into five stretches, reaches or divisions, representing five distinct characteristics, namely: Grandeur, Repose, Sublimity, The Picturesque, and Beauty. 1. The Palisades, an unbroken wall of rock for fifteen miles—_Grandeur._ 2. The Tappanzee, surrounded by the sloping hills of Nyack, Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow—_Repose._ 3. The Highlands, where the Hudson for twenty miles plays “hide and seek” with hills “rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun”—_Sublimity._ 4. The Hillsides, for miles above and below Poughkeepsie—_The Picturesque._ 5. The Catskills, on the west, throned in queenly dignity—_Beauty._ George William Curtis, the great traveler, the close observer, the perfect gentleman, pronounced the Hudson grander than the Rhine, and Thackeray, in his “Virginians,” has given the Hudson the verdict of beauty.