426 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. ix. 



Mackenzie River district, between Great Slave Lake and the 

 Arctic Sea, a region which that Church has almost made its own. 

 Starting sometimes from St. Joseph's mission station, near Fort 

 Resolution, on Great Slave Lake, sometimes from S. Theresa, on 

 Great Bear Lake, sometimes from Notre Dame de Bonne Espe- 

 rance on the Mackenzie, points many hundreds of miles asunder, 

 he has, on foot or in canoe, often accompanied only by Indians 

 or Esquimaux, again and again traversed that desolate country 

 in every direction. He has passed four winters and a summer 

 on Great Bear Lake, and explored every part of it. He has 

 navigated the Mackenzie ten times between Great Slave Lake 

 and Fort Good Hope, and eight times between the latter post 

 and its mouth. We owe to his visits in 1870 the disentangle- 

 ment of a confusion which existed between the mouth of the 

 Peel River (R. Plum^e) and those of the Mackenzie, owing to 

 their uniting in one delta, the explanation of the so-called Esqui- 

 maux Lake, which, as Ri(?hardson conjectured, has no existence, 

 and the delineation of the course of three large rivers which fall 

 into the Polar Sea in tliat neighborhood, the ' Anderson,' discov- 

 ered by Mr. MacFarlane, in 1859, a river named by himself the 

 Macfarlane, and another he has called the Ronciere. Sir John 

 Richardson was aware of the existence of the second of these, 

 and erroneously supposed it to be the ' Toothless Fish,' River 

 of the Hare Indians (Beg-hui la on his map). M. Petitot has 

 also traced and sketched in several lakes and chains of lakes, 

 which support his opinion that this region is partaking of that 

 operation of elevation which extends to Hudson's Bay. He 

 found the wild granite basin of one of these dried up, and dis- 

 covered in it, yawning and terrible, the huge funnel opening by 

 which the waters had been drawn into one of the many subter- 

 ranean channels which the Indians believe to exist here. 



" These geographical discoveries are but a small part of I'Abb^ 

 Petitot's services. His intimate knowledge of the languages of 

 the Northern Indians has enabled him to rectify the names given 

 by previous travellers, and to interpret those descriptive appella- 

 tions of the natives, which are often so full of significance. He 

 has profoundly studied their ethnology and tribal relations, and 

 he has added greatly to our knowledge of the geology of this 

 region. 



" It is, however, much to be regretted that this excellent 

 traveller was provided with no instruments except a pocket watch 



