2 DR. DANIEL WILSON. 
that will not equally justify a like organization of French and English sections of Geology, 
Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics. The vague comprehensiveness of the title 
of English Literature will, I believe, only hamper and weaken this section; and I earnestly 
trust that—except in so far as the adequate treatment of any of the subjects of so com- 
prehensive a field of study and research may be assumed to furnish contributions to 
English Literature,—that department will no longer be assigned to us; but that in lieu of 
it, the entire work properly included under the titles of History and Archeology, with 
whatever else may be recognized as legitimately embraced in the term “allied subjects,” 
shall constitute the work of this Section. 
Assembled as we now are for the purpose of organization, and with many details 
demanding our most careful consideration, I trust I shall not be considered as trespassing 
beyond the proper limits of an inaugural address in pressing those preliminary points on 
your notice. Meanwhile the multifarious themes embraced in the work assigned to this 
section of our newly organized society, render it all the more difficult to select a subject 
applicable to this occasion without seeming to give invidious prominence to one or other 
of the distinctive branches which claim your attention. But looking to the foundation 
of the Royal Society of Canada as a new step in the development of our country, it may 
not prove unsuitable if I revert to some archeological and literary indices of the first 
glimpses of this Western Continent by men of the old world; and glance at it in its 
distinctive individuality as a world apart from all the arenas of Semitic or Aryan civilization. 
It is not without reason that we still speak of this western hemisphere as the New 
World. The date of its discovery and all the attendant circumstances constitute the era a 
definite index beyond all else, marking the world’s entrance on modern centuries; a fresh 
starting point in the history of the old world, as well as the beginning of that of the new. 
The history of the latter is for us necessarily modern. Unless we reckon the Mexican 
hieroglyphic codices and the sculptured but undecipherable records of Central America 
and Peru as historical documents, all that here dates before the memorable A. D. 1492 is 
prehistoric. How far back that unrecorded period may yet be traced it would be pre- 
sumptuous to assign a limit. But of our own Canadian domain, through all its wide 
stretch of territory, westward to the Pacific and northward to the pole, it must be 
owned that as yet nothing has disclosed itself indicative of other than ephemeral tribes 
akin to the nomads who still wander aimlessly over the prairies, or linger in diminishing 
numbers beyond the Rocky Mountains. I know but of one inscription in Canada which 
seems to suggest the possibiliy of a genuine native graven record. Of earth-works, graded 
terraces, or memorial mounds, we have none on a scale beyond the capacity of the rude 
forest or prairie tribes; and of sculpture or architecture, akin to the ruined palaces of 
Yucatan, or the temples and cyclopzean remains of Peru, we have no other trace than is 
discernible in the curious reappearance of the same style and conventional art-forms, in 
ivory carvings of the Tawatin Indians of British Columbia, and the elaborate ornamentations 
of the ephemeral lodges of the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands. 
If, indeed, we turn to philological evidence, the languages of the aborigines of Canada, 
and of the Eskimos, in their essentially distinctive families; and the multiplicity of 
dialects, remote in all respects from the characteristic affinities of the languages of the 
old world: point, beyond question, to the lapse of unnumbered centuries during which 
successive generations have run their course, more unprogressively than the autumns of 
