106 DANIEL WILSON ON THE HUEON-IROQUOIS. 



It is not without inteivst to note in conclusion that the main body of the representa- 

 tives of the nations of the ancient Iroquois League, sprung from the Huron-Iroquois stock 

 of eastern Canada, — after sojourning for centuries beyond the St. Lawrence, until the tradi- 

 tions of their origin had faded out of memory, or given place to mythic legends of 

 autochthonic origin, — has returned to Canadian soil. At Caughnawaga, St. Regis, Oka, 

 and on the Eiver St. Charles, in the province of Quebec ; at Anderdon, the Bay of Quinte, 

 and above all, on the Grand River, in Ontario ; the Huron-Iroc[uois are now settled to the 

 number of upiwards of 8,000, without reckoning other tribes. If, indeed, the surviving 

 representatives of the Aborigines in the old provinces of the Dominion are taken as a 

 whole, they number upwards of 34,000, apart from the many thousands in Manitoba, 

 British Columbia, and the Northwest Tei-ritories. But the nomad Indians of the North- 

 west mvist be classed wholly apart from the settlers on the Grrand River reserves. The 

 latter are a highly intelligent, civilized people, more and more adapting themselves to the 

 habits of the stranger immigrants who have supplanted them ; and are destined as cer- 

 tainly to merge into the predominant race, as the waters of their ancient lakes mingle and 

 are lost in the Ocean. Tet the process is no longer one of extinction, but of absorption ; 

 and will assuredly leave enduring traces of the American autochthones, similar to those 

 which still, in the Melanochroi of Europe, perpetuate some ethnical memorial of its 

 allophylian races. 



