The truth is, this suggestion of a peaceful passage for the great Algonquin army, is to be found originally in the 20th chapter of Numbers, in the demand made, by divine direction, by the Jewish leader for a safe passport through the land of Edom, for the faithful performance of which there was a divine guaranty. And when the kind father had taught this historical lesson to his peaceable disciples on the banks of the Muskingum, he did not perceive, in afterwards putting down the traditions of his favorite Delawares, how completely they had adapted a sacred event to the exigencies of savage life, in a host of lawless invaders in the American wilderness, in the 12th century. But we are not only to take this entire tradition of 1819, of an event happening 600 years before, in extenso, with all its moral exactness of motive, in the original actors, without any abatements or corrections required by other traditions or history, but the good father, whose moral excellence is pure and unimpeachable, but who was no philologist, aims to make the existing lexicography of the Delaware _prove_ the tradition; and we have, in a footnote, a forced etymology of the name of the river Mississippi, to demonstrate that this is a Delaware name. Now, the name of this river is not “Namaesa Sipu,” that is, sturgeon, trout, or as he gives it, “fish river,” but MISSI-SIPPI—a derivative from the adjective _great_, in an aboriginal sense, and sippi, a river. Mr. Gallatin (Archa. Am. vol. 2) is inclined to believe that it should be translated “the whole river,” or a unity of waters, but neither he nor any other commentator, has been able to make “fish” out of “missi.” The merest tyro in the Indian languages, must perceive that the etymology does not bear the meaning of Fish river, and if it did, it would prove, contrary to their reputation, that the Indians give the most inappropriate geographical names, of all men in existence. Fish river would be the most malappropriate name for the Mississippi. Its turbid waters and rushing channel, surcharged with floating trees, and subject to a thousand physical mutations every season, is absolutely forbidding to the larger number of species, and favorable only to the coarser kinds which are rejected from the table of the epicure.