While annual explorations are thus throwing more and more light on the interior of the peninsula, the United States Coast Survey, now in operation, will definitely settle all kindred questions relative to its shores, harbors, and islands; and thus we may look forward to a not distant day when its geographical history will be consummated. CHAPTER II. THE APALACHES. Derivation of the name.--Earliest notices of.--Visited and described by Bristock in 1653.--Authenticity of his narrative.--Subsequent history and final extinction. Among the aboriginal tribes of the United States perhaps none is more enigmatical than the Apalaches. They are mentioned as an important nation by many of the early French and Spanish travellers and historians, their name is preserved by a bay and river on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and by the great eastern coast range of mountains, and has been applied by ethnologists to a family of cognate nations that found their hunting-grounds from the Mississippi to the Atlantic and from the Ohio river to the Florida Keys; yet, strange to say, their own race and place have been but guessed at. Intimately connected both by situation and tradition with the tribes of the Floridian peninsula, an examination of the facts pertaining to their history and civilization is requisite to a correct knowledge of the origin and condition of the latter. The orthography of the name is given variously by the older writers, Apahlahche, Abolachi, Apeolatei, Appallatta, &c., and very frequently without the first letter, Palaxy, Palatcy. Daniel Coxe, indeed, fancifully considered this first vowel the Arabic article _a_, _al_, prefixed by the Spaniards to the native word.[130] Its derivation has been a _questio vexata_ among Indianologists; Heckewelder[131] identified it with Lenape or Wapanaki, “which name the French in the south as easily corrupted into _Apalaches_ as in the north to _Abenakis_,” and other writers have broached equally loose hypothesis. Adair[132] mentions a Chikasah town, Palacheho, evidently from the same root; but it is not from this tongue nor any of its allies, that we must explain its meaning, but rather consider it an indication of ancient connections with the southern continent, and in itself a pure Carib word. _Apáliché_ in the Tamanaca dialect of the Guaranay stem on the Orinoco signifies _man_,[133] and the earliest application of the name in the northern continent was as a title of the chief of a country, _l’homme par excellence_,[134] and hence, like very many other Indian tribes (Apaches, Lenni Lenape, Illinois,) his subjects assumed by eminence the proud appellation of The Men. How this foreign word came to be imported will be considered hereafter. Among the tribes that made up the confederacy, probably only one partook of the warring and energetic blood of the Caribs; or it may have been assumed in emulation of a famous neighbor; or it may have been a title of honor derived from the