Some surviving remnant, such as even a war of extermination spares, may have been absorbed into the conquering nation, after the fashion systematically pursued by the Huron-Iroquois in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nor is this a mere conjecture. Mr. Horatio Hale, recognising the evident traces in the Cherokee language of a grammar mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocabulary is largely recruited from some foreign source, thinks it not improbable that the origin of the Cherokee nation may have been due to a union of the survivors of the old Mound-Builder stock with some branch of the conquering race; just as in 1649 a fugitive remnant of the Hurons from the Georgian Bay were adopted into the Seneca nation;[62] and a few years later such of the captive Eries as escaped torture and the stake were admitted into affiliation with their conquerors.[63] The whole region to the east of the Mississippi, from the fifty-second to the thirty-sixth degree of north latitude, appears to have been occupied by the two great Indian stocks, the Algonquin-Lenape and the Iroquois. But Gallatin, who directed special attention to the determination of the elements of philological affinity between them, recognised to the south of their region the existence of at least three essentially distinct languages of extensive use: the Catawba, the Cherokee, and that which he assumed to include in a common origin, both the Muskhogee and the Choctaw.[64] But besides those, six well-ascertained languages of smaller tribes, including those of the Uchees and the Natchez, appear to demand separate recognition. Their region differs essentially from those over which the Algonquin and Iroquois war-parties ranged at will. It is broken up by broad river channels, and intersected by impenetrable swamps; and has thus afforded refuge for the remnants of conquered tribes, and for the preservation of distinct languages among small bands of refugees. The Timucuas were the ancient occupants of Florida; but they appear to have been displaced by the Chatta-Muskogee nations; driven forth, as is surmised, from their homes in the Ohio valley; and the older race is only known now by the preservation of its language in works of the Spanish missionaries.[65]