When the missionaries came among the Indians these shrewd and able medicine men, “powwow” and “medeu,” accustomed to practice upon the credulity of the unsuspecting red-skin, foresaw that the new faith would destroy their power and incidentally curtail their revenues, and therefore they vigorously attacked the gospel teachings, and often the self-sacrificing missionaries to the Indians were compelled to complain of the evil influence exerted by these false prophets upon the aborigines. The principal sacred ceremony of the Indians was the dance and accompanying song. This was called the “kanti kanti,” meaning to sing. From this noisy rite the white settlers coined the word “cantico,” which still survives and is a word with us. The early English occupants of America gave little attention to the Indian language beyond an acquisition of what was indispensable to trading with the natives. Dr. Brinton declares that William Penn professed to have acquired a mastery of it, but says that from the specimens Penn gives it is evident that all he studied was the traders’ jargon, which was about a near pure Lenape as pigeon English is to Macaulay’s periods. In the Lenape language, which contains two slightly different dialects, all words are derived from simple monosyllabic roots, by means of affixes and suffixes, and they do not come within our grammatical category as nouns, adjectives, verbs and other parts of speech, but are indifferent themes, and to this there appear to be few exceptions. The genius of the language is _holophrastic_, that is, its effort is to express the relationship of several ideas by combining them in one word. This is an example: “popochpoalimawoawoll” (po-poch-po-al-i-ma-wo-a-woll), meaning “they beat them” and “wunshillawoawoll” (wun-shill-a-wo-woll), meaning “they killed them.” During the War of the Revolution the Delawares were first neutral and then partisans of the Americans and thus prevented attack by hostile Indians on the Jersey towns and settlements. The Delawares were passionately fond of their ancestral traditions and their forefathers, and cherished the belief that they were the wisest and bravest of men. They loved to rehearse their genealogies. They were so skilled at it that they could repeat the chief and collateral lines with the utmost readiness. The Indians were all passionately fond of games and were mostly inveterate gamblers, yet, according to authority, they cultivated among themselves a most scrupulous honesty, always kept their promises, insulted no one, were hospitable to strangers and faithful to their friends even unto death. On the subject of the Indians’ devotion to gambling the following may be pardoned. Bret Harte, in one of his humorous and purposely ungrammatical wild western poems, speaking of his friend Bill Nye’s visit to a mining camp, said: “For the camp has gone wild On this lottery game, And has even beguiled Injin Dick’ by the same.” and, later on,