The grand movement of the barbarian races of Northern Europe in the fifth and following centuries is spoken of as the wandering of the nations. The natural barriers of the continent seemed for a time to have given way, and the unknown tribes from beyond the Baltic and from the shores of the North Sea poured into the valley of the Danube, and swept beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees to the furthest shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The physical geography of the New World presents fewer barriers to be surmounted. But if the student of North American ethnology spread before him a map of the continent, and trace out the wanderings of the Huron-Iroquois, he must revert in fancy to that remote era when confederated Iroquois and Algonkins swept in triumphant fury through the wasted valley of the Ohio, and repeated there what Goth and Hun did for Europe, in Rome’s decline and fall. The long-settled and semi-civilised Mound-Builders fled before the furious onset, leaving the great river-valley a desolate waste. The barrier of an old-settled and well-organised community, which, probably for centuries, had kept America’s northern barbarians in check, was removed, and the fierce Huron-Iroquois ranged at will over the eastern regions of the continent, far southward of the North Carolina river-valleys, where the Nottoways and Tuscaroras found a new home. As to the Nottoways, they appear to have passed out of all remembrance as an Iroquois tribe; yet it is suggestive of a long-forgotten chapter of Indian history, that the name is still in use among the northern Algonkins as the designation of the whole Iroquois stock. The Nottawa saga is doubtless a memorial of their presence on the Georgian Bay, and the Notaway (_Náhdahwe_) river which falls into Hudson Bay at James Bay, is so named in memory of Huron-Iroquois wanderers into that Algonkin region.