294 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. viii. 



nications two ; namely, that on Inscriptions from Easter Island 

 presented by Mr. D. Robertson, and Notes on Animals of India, 

 did not refer to the natural history of this country. With re- 

 spect to the former, however, I may say that it has a connection 

 with America in the circumstance that so many indications point 

 to a migration of civilized or semi-civilized men into America by 

 way of the Pacific, and to the probability that Easter Island 

 was one of the stations in this migration. Mr. Hyde Clarke 

 and Dr. Wilson have both directed attention to this subject, and 

 have shown that in languages and physical features there are 

 links of connection between the Polynesian and the Peruvian 

 races, and that the ruins of large stone buildings found in so 

 many of the Polynesian Islands, as well as the arts practised in 

 those islands, point to similar conclusions. The possession of a 

 sort of picture writing for the keeping of family and tribal 

 records in Easter Island, and the not very remote resemblance 

 of this to some familiar American contrivances of the same kind, 

 furnishes an additional link of connection. On the often dis- 

 puted question of the source or sources of the aboriginal Ameri- 

 can population, it now seems to be the settled conclusion of 

 archaeology that we have good evidence of prehistoric migrations 

 of man into America by Behring's Straits from Northern Asia; 

 by the Pacific Islands from Southern Asia ; and by the Equato- 

 rial Atlantic, by way of the Canaries and West Iudia Islands. 

 To these we have to add the probability of Chinese and Japanese 

 ships having at various times been drifted upon the Pacific 

 coast, and the discovery of Greenland and part of the mainland 

 of America by the Norsemen in the tenth century. Thus there 

 seems to be not one way merely but several in which America 

 may have received its early population, aud by which we may 

 account for the native races of America with their languages and 

 customs merely as derivatives from the old world, and without 

 supposing these tribes to be true Autochthones. 



Two very interesting communications of a geological character 

 were those of Prof. Hind on the Geology of Labrador, aud of 

 Mr. G. M. Dawson on Recent Elevations and Subsidences of the 

 Land in British Columbia. Remote though these regions are 

 from each other, they present some remarkable points of simi- 

 larity, especially in relation to their more recent geological his- 

 tory. In both we have the evidence of the great glacial age. In 

 both the surface glaciation and transport of boulders seem to 



