Tradition, not of the highest character, gives us the words Talligeu, or Talligwee, as the name of this ancient nation, although it is nearly identical in sounds with the existing and true name of the Cherokees, which, according to the late Elias Boudinot, (a Cherokee,) is TSALLAKEE. Col. Gibson, a plain man, an Indian trader and no philologist, who furnished Mr. Jefferson with Indian vocabularies of the dialects of his day, to be used in answer to the inquiries of Catherine the Great, (vide Trans. Royal Academy, Petersburgh,) expressed an opinion that this ancient people did not use a T before the epithet, but were called Allegewee. Tradition has, however, strictly speaking, preserved neither of these terms, although both appear to have strong affinities with them. The word Alleghany has come down to us, from the earliest times, as the name of the great right-hand fork of the Ohio, and also as the name, from the same remote period of antiquity, of the chain of mountains of which the stream itself may be said to be the most remote northeasterly tributary. In this form it is evidently a local term, applied geographically, according to the general principles of the Indian languages, like _hanna_ in the Susquehanna, and _hannock_ in the Rappahannock, which appear to denote, in each case, a river, or torrent of water. By removing this local inflection, we have Alleghan as the proper term for the people, and I have felt sustained, by this inductive process, in regarding Alleghan as the original cognomen of the “_mound builders_” of North America. Having thus given my views with respect to the particular word which awakened this discussion, permit me now to turn to the other matters, so confidently brought forward by the secretary of the Maryland Historical Society. The Iroquois affirm that they formerly lived in the area of the Cherokee country. (Clin. Dis. N. Y. H. Soc., vol.) Captain Smith met a war party of this nation, in exploring one of the rivers of Virginia in 1608. So late as the era of the settlement of North Carolina, they brought off to the north the last of their cantons, in the tribe of the Tuscaroras. They sold the lands as far south as Kentucky river. (Imlay’s Hist. Kent.) They _quitclaimed_ the soil in northern Virginia and Maryland, and they quite forbid all sales of land by the Delawares. All authorities, indeed, concur in showing the track of their migration, prior to 1600, to have been from the south to the north and northeast. Affiliation of language is also thought to denote their origin in the south. (Vide Gallatin, 2 vol. Archa. Amer.) The Hurons, who are of the same stock, affirm that they were originally the first of all the nations, and call the Lenapees, who have assumed the same distinction, _nephews_, denoting inferiority in the chronological and ethnological chain. In this term of nephews, so applied to the Delawares, all the Iroquois tribes concur. (Vide Oneota.)