152 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [^P^il, 



be strengthened by the fact stated by N. 0., that perhaps the root 

 " sit," foot, is the only one common to the neighboring Iroquois 

 and Algonquin languages ; unless, indeed, it should appear that 

 these two languages have been derived the one from the east, the 

 other from the west, and have met in Canada. To give force to 

 these comparisons of roots, it would be necessary to show that they 

 occur also in the Carib, or other languages of that region, and in 

 the extinct Gu an che of the Canaries, or in some of the ancient lan- 

 guages of Northern Africa or Southwestern Europe. At one time 

 there was a strong tendency to get up fanciful resemblances between 

 languages. The tide has turned, and the prejudices of scholars 

 are all the other way. For this very reason we thank N. 0. for bis 

 effort, and would encourage, in the interests of ethnology, all the 

 honest cultivators of the comparative philology of even those prim- 

 itive tongues, unjustly neglected as barbarous and uncultivated ; 

 though for that very reason, like the habits and rites of the people 

 who speak them, they may, as Dr. Wilson has well shown, be of 

 inestimable value in interpreting the primitive relations of men, 

 and their condition in " pre-historic times." 



MEETING OF BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 



Geography and Ethnology. 



In this section, after some opening observations on the progress 

 made between 1838 and 1863 in the vast centre of industry on 

 the Tyue, the President remarked : " I will first call your attention 

 to some of the leading geographical results in British Geography 

 which have been broucrht about since we last met here. At 

 that time four years had elapsed since (at our first meeting in 

 Scotland) I directed the attention of this Association to the un- 

 toward condition of the Topographical Survey of the British Isles, 

 by showing that no map of any country north of the Trent was in 

 existence ; in short, that all the North of England and the whole 

 of Scotland were in that lamentable state ; whilst the survey of 

 France, and of nearly all the little states of Germany, had been 

 completed. Having roused public sentiment to this neglected 

 state of the national map, — so neglected, indeed, that one of the 

 great headlands (Cape Wrath) was known to have been laid down 

 some miles out of its proper place in all maps and charts, — depu- 

 tations to the government followed, in the first of which I pleaded 



