140 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
more importance are the marine animals, especially the shell-fish, upon 
the flats and reefs about the island. In the sand flats occurs a great 
abundance of good clams, and with them great beds of the common 
mussels, an animal much eaten in Europe, though little esteemed in 
this country. The abundance of these forms is emphasized by Cham- 
plain! and by Lescarbot,? and is noted upon Wright’s map of 1797 
(Fig. 12); and, without doubt, it had much to do with the selection of 
the island as the site of the settlement in 1604. With these, and on the 
rocks between tide marks, occur many other forms of lesser economic 
importance,— three or four forms of sea-snails, limpets, sea-urchins, 
star-fishes, jelly-fishes, barnacles, and so many others* as to make 
the zoology of the island a very interesting study, and the island 
itself an excellent situation for some scientific station for the study 
of marine life. In this connection it is worth noting that there has 
been found upon the island and in Oak Bay a southern form of star- 
fish, not elsewhere known in this region north of Casco Bay, which 
fact, taken with other evidence, proves the former occurrence here 
of an interesting southern colony of animals now nearly extinct.* 
Natives.— Among the other natural productions of the region we 
must include its wild men. The Indians of this region were, and 
are, of the Passamaquoddy tribe, a portion of the race called by 
Champlain, the Etechmins, and by modern writers, the Abenaki. They 
have always formed but a sparse population, of mild and inoffensive 
disposition; and never in the history of the Passamaquoddy region 
have their hands been raised against the white settlers, French or Eng- 
lish. Fear of these Indians, now known to have been groundless, but 
very real to the French, was one of the causes leading to the selection 
of the easily defended island by de Monts as the site of his settle- 
ment in 1604. 
Effect of environment on early history— We may now summarize 
briefly the effect of the natural facts and phenomena just considered 
upon the island’s history, which all hinges upon its selection by 
de Monts as the site of his settlement in 1604, as fully related in the 
following pages. 
Why then was the island selected? In the first place, standing 
as it does, a small but elevated island all alone in the very middle 
of a large river, it is a striking place with a distinctive and individual 
character. Thus it would attract the immediate attention of 

1 See later, page 168. 
? See later, page 182. 
3 These forms of animal life have been fully treated for this region in 
various articles in the Bulletins of the Natural History Society of New Bruns- 
wick, later mentioned, page 152. 
* Considered in the aforementioned Bulletin, IX., 1890, page 54. 
