Benson's memoir.                             93
still remaining among us; from the name Coney, there are already symptoms of the beginning of a tradition that it once abounded in Rabbits. The Narrows they called the Hoofden, their name for the forelands on the British coast, literally head lands. The names of the towns in the vicinity, Utretcht, Breuckelen, corrupted to Brookline, and Amers-tort, changed to Flatlands, denote the district in the Father Land, furnishing the first settlers. Gravesend settled, and in Dutch time and under a Dutch grant, by some families immediately from England—a Lady Deborah Moody, the Dido, leading the colony. Flatbush; a corruption, and may also serve as a translation, of its Dutch name, Vlachte-bos —its primitive Dutch name, Midwout, Midwood—why or whence changed, does not appear. A conjecture is offered, that BaEtcKELEN and Amersfort were, from their proximity to the waters, earliest settled, and a space intermediate and about equidistant between them remained as Wout or Bos, Wood, and denoted as the Midwout, and the Bos on the Plain or Vlachte, the site of the present village of Flatbush, as to be distinguished from Bos or Wood, on the contiguous Geberghle, or Ridge, came to be designated as the Vlaghte-Bos. Rustdorp, the Dutch name for Jamaica, say countrytown. Coe and his associates, in their application, 1C56, to Stuyvesant, for the lands there, represent themselves as "living at a new plantation, near the Beaver path, called Jemaico"—hence the subsequent Jamaica. We find the Dutch Vlissengen, in the English Flushing; and the Armbn Bouerey, the Farm, purchased by the Deaconry of New York for the use of the Poor, in an intended translation of it, the Poor Bowery. The Dutch called the Bay bounded on the south by the ocean, on the east by Long Island, on the north partly by the mouth of the Hudson and partly by the shore of New Jersey, and on the west wholly by the shore of New Jersey, and Staten Island considered as lying within it, The Great Bay of New Netherland, and so called, as Van Der Donck expresses it, "propter Excel-lentiam," eminently the Bay. Newark Bay, from its relative situation to the Great Bay, they called Het achter Cul, literally the Back Bay; Cul, borrowed from the French Cul de sac, and also in use with the Dutch to signify a bay. Achter Cu^, found in very early writings, in English referring toit, corrupted to Arthur Cut's Bay: the passage from it into the Great Bay they called Het Kiu. van het Cull, the Kill of the Cul, finally come to be .expressed by the Kills. A reef in the Bay, not far from the mouth of the Kills, Rqbyns