Note 224 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.

Winslow, in his Relations, says of the Indians: “The people are very ingenious and observative; they keep account of time by the moon, and winters or summers; they know divers of the stars by name; in particular they know the north star, and call it maske, which is to say, the bear.” (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., pp. 365-6.) See also to the same effect, Roger Williams’s Key (Publications of the Narragansett Club, vol. i.) and Mr. Trumbull’s note (p. 105). Mr. Trumbull now further adds: “The name (maske) was given to Ursa Major or Charles’s Wain, not to the North Star; and by nearly all Algonkin tribes. An interesting note on this point can be found in Hopkins’s Hist. Memorials of the Housatonic Indians (p. 11), and another in Dawson’s Acadian Geology (2d ed. p. 675), showing that the Micmacs still know that constellation as Mooin, ‘the bear.’”