CANADA, A TYPICAL EACB OF AMERICAN ABOEIGINBS. 77 



this old nation as it vanished from the scene. Of the snrvivors, the greater niimber were 

 adopted, according to Indian fashion, into the Seneca nation. 



Some of the earthworks met with to the south of Lake Erie show proofs of greater con- 

 structive kibour than anything found in Canada. Still more interesting are the primitive 

 hieroglyphics of an inscription on Cunningham's Island, ascribed to the Eries, and which 

 Schoolcraft describes as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found on the 

 continent.' But the rock inscription, though highly interesting as an example of native 

 symbolism and pictographic writing, throws no light on the history of its carvers; and 

 of their language no memorial is recoverable, for they had ceased to exist before the great 

 lake which perpetuates their name was known to the French. 



More accurate information has been preserved in reference to the Hurons, among 

 whom the Jesuit Fathers laboured with self-denying zeal, from time to time reporting 

 the results in their " Relations" to the Provincial of the Order at Paris. One of the most 

 characteristic religious ceremonies of the Hurons was the great "Feast of the Dead," cele- 

 brated apparently at intervals of twelve years, when the remains of their dead were 

 gathered from scaffolded biers, or remote graves, and deposited amid general mournijig 

 in the great cemetery of the tribe. Valuable robes and furs, pottery, copper kettles and 

 others of their choicest possessions, including the pyrulfp, or large tropical shells brought 

 from the Gulf of Mexico, with wampum, prized imjilements, and personal ornaments, 

 were all thrown into the great trench, which was then solemnly covered over. By the 

 exj)loration of those Huron ossuaries, the sites of the palisaded villages of tlu; Hiirons of 

 the seventeenth century haA'e been identified in recent years ; and there are now 

 preserved in the Laval University at Quebec upwards of eighty skiills recovered from 

 cemeteries at St. Ignace, St. Joachin, Ste. Marie, St. Michael, and other villages, the 

 scenes of self-denying labour, and in some cases of the cruel torturings, of the French 

 missionaries by whom they were thus designated. Other examples of skulls from the 

 same ossuaries, I may add, are now in the museums of the University of Toronto, the London 

 Anthropological Society, and the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The skulls recovered from 

 those ossuaries have a special value from the fact that the last survivors were driven out 

 of the country by their Iroquois foes in 1649 ; and hence the crania recovered from them 

 may be relied vipou as fairly illustrating the physical characteristics of the race before 

 they had been affected by intercourse with Europeans. The Huron skull is of a well 

 defined dolichocephalic type, with, in many cases, an unusiial prominence of the 

 occipital region ; the parietal bones meet more or less at an angle at the sagittal suture ; 

 the forehead is flat and receding ; the sirperciliary ridges in the male skulls are strongly 

 developed ; the malar bones are broad and flat, and the profile is orthognathic. Careful 

 measurements of thirty-nine male skulls yield a mean longitudinal diameter of *7.o9 to a 

 parietal diameter of 5.50 ; and of eighteen female skulls, a longitirdinal diameter of *7.07 

 to a parietal diameter of 5.22. " 



Who were the people found by Cartier in 1535, seemingly long settled and pros- 

 perous, occupying the fortified towns of Stadacoué and Hochelaga, and lower points on 

 the St. Lawrence ? The question is not without a special interest to Canadians. According to 



' History of the Indian Tribes, vol. ii, p. 78. 



- " Huron Race and Head-form." Canadian Journal, N.S., vol. xiii., p. 113. 



