670 MISCEL^^ANEOUS PAPERS RELATING TO ANTHROPOLOGY. 



work of art"? In the paper which I read before the New Brunswick 

 Society I was unable to give any tolerably satisfactory reply to this. 

 At the present time I think that 1 can suggest an answer which 

 may be correct, and which, at least, deserves some consideration. The 

 members of that society were, if I mistake not, generally impressed with 

 the force of the arguments brought forward to support the suggestion 

 that the sculptor was an Indian, and were kiclined to guess that the 

 carving was, in some indefinite way, connected with the funeral rites, 

 or was in commemoration of a departed brave. No work published at 

 that time afforded any solution of the difficulty. No relics of a similar 

 character to this had been dug up at any Indian burial ground in New 

 Brunswick, and although our Indians produce very well executed full 

 relief figures of the beaver, the muskrat, and the otter, upon soapstone 

 pipes, their skill apparently goes no further in this direction. I have 

 indeed seen rude sketches of human figures executed by these people, 

 but have never seen or been informed of any likeness to a man being- 

 carved by them in stone. It was only by bringing pieces of informa- 

 tion together, and after the lapse of some years, that I was enabled to 

 suggest an answer to an apparently almost unanswerable question. 

 Upon one occasion, while in conversation with an old resident of St. 

 George, he gave me an account of a somewhat singular monument 

 which, many years before this period, stood on the summit of a high 

 hill near tha canal, and about one-half mile distant from the place 

 where the carved stone was found. It consisted of a large oval or 

 rounded stone, weighing, as my informant roughly estimates, seventy- 

 five hundred weight, lying on three vertical stone columns, from ten 

 inches to one foot in height, and firmly sunk in the ground thus . • . 

 (The above weight, I should imagine, is an over-estimate, but I give it 

 as stated to me.) The site of this monument is marked b on the pre- 

 ceding map. My informant stated that the boys and other visitors 

 were in the habit of throwing stones at the columns, and that eventually 

 the monument was tumbled over, by the combined effort of a number 

 of ship carpenters, and fell crashing into the valley. Some years after- 

 wards I read, for the first time, Francis Parkman's " Pioneers of France 

 in the New World," when my attention was at once arrested, and the 

 conversation with the gentleman from St. George brought to my mind, 

 by a j)assage which occurs on page 349, of that highly interesting 

 work. 



Champlain, the writer states, had journeyed up the Ottawa Eiver be- 

 yond Lake Coulange, and had reached an island in the neighborhood 

 of the village of a chief named Tessonat, which, Mr. Park man is of 

 opinion, was on the Lower Lake des Allumettes. I quote what the his- 

 torian writes of what the French explorer sees : "Here, too, was a 

 cemetery, which excited the wonder of Champlain, for the dead were 

 better cared for than the living. Over each grave a flat tablet of 

 wood was supported on posts, and at one end stood an upright tablet, 

 carved with an intended representation of the features of the deceased." 



