214 KOY A L SOCIETY OF CAN A DA 



vividness and ploasure are so much the greater when one can stand upon 

 the exact spot where the events occurred and feel himself surrounded by 

 the very witnesses, inanimate though they be. of these events. This 

 feeling has been tinely expressed by Crawford when he says : — " We 

 have an involuntaiy reverence for all witnesses of History, bo they 

 animate or inanimate, men, animals or stones." Perhaps, after all, this 

 feeling may be but a phase of our still active though unconscious 

 animism, a relic of the feeling which in primitive races peoples all great 

 objects with conscious spirits. 



It has always seemed to me that even our greater writers of history 

 have not, as a rule, taken sufficient account of this feeling in the majority 

 of their readers. In -their treatment of local events they are often 

 excusably inaccurate, or even inexcusably careless, but they lose thereby 

 a great opportunity to increase their audience and influence. Men ai-e 

 prone to judge the whole by the part thoy themselves know, and if a 

 reader discovers that the subjects he knows and likes best are badly 

 treated, he is likely to suspect other parts, and even to condemn the whole 

 work. There is, however, great excuse for neglect of local archœology 

 by historians of wide interests, for it is a subject requiring minute and 

 especially personal investigation, and this of course they have not time 

 to give. Local archaeology must, in order to be well done, form a subject 

 for investigation by itself, and, in order to inspire confidence, mu.st be 

 worked out in the fullest, most comprehensive and most scientific manner. 

 When this is done, the general historian may accept its results with con- 

 fidence, and make his work locally accurate and complete. A compre- 

 hensive monographic study of the subject 'is likely also to develop new 

 facts, and especially new connections of cause and efïect, and new gene- 

 ralizations. Moreover, the work should be done before the events are 

 too long past, and their sites have had time to be obscured by forget ful- 

 ness, mis|)la(ted by the vagaries of tradition, or hidden by topogra])hical 

 or other changes. This kind of work is not, 1 admit, as high a grade of 

 historical study as the investigation of the origin of institutions, which 

 seems to be the highest aim of history, but it supplies details for history 

 and materials for making it more real and attractive. It is for history 

 much what dictionaries are for literature. 



These observations sufficiently explain the objects of the present 

 work, which arc, in brief, the locating of events of New Brunswick history 

 for the use of the many whom it does and will in the future interest, the 

 supplying of accurate and complete local archaeological data for the use 

 of the general historian whose work may deal with or touch upon New 

 Brunswick, the recovery of facts as to earlier events before their location 

 is for ever lost, and an attempt to discover, from the grouping of the 

 known facts, new ones and new principles. My ideal has been to describe 

 every i)hxce of any importance to our local history so exactly that the 



