440 THF: ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



acceptance, but another geologist, a great Nova Scotian, best known 

 to us as Sir William Dawson, who in 1855, in the first edition of his 

 great work Acadian Geology, page 1, wrote thus: — 



The aboriginal Micmacs of Nova Scotia, being of a practical turn of mind, were 

 in the habit of bestowing on places the names of the useful articles which could be 

 found in them, affixing to such terms the word Acadie, denoting the local abundance 

 of the particular objects to which the names referred. The early French settlers 

 appear to have supposed this common termination to be the proper name for the 

 country, and applied it as the general designation of the region now constituting the 

 provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; which still 

 retain Acadia as their poetical appellation, and as a convenient general term for the 

 Lower Provinces of British America as distinguished from Canada. 



In the second edition of the same work, in 1868, 1-3, Dawson, 

 evidently under the stimulus of the erroneous interpretation of Mudge 

 and Featherstonhaugh presently to be mentioned, entered much more 

 elaborately into the subject. He stated that in his own boyhood, 

 the meaning of the Micmac termination acadie had been explained to 

 him by an aged Micmac, — who had "illustrated by the word Shuhen- 

 acadie," which he derived from "Sgabun" meaning ground-nuts or 

 Indian potatoes, and acadie, meaning abundant. Further, with the 

 aid of Rand, then rising into that prominence which made him later 

 by far the greatest of authorities upon the Micmac language, he 

 gave a list of some ten names ending in Kaddy or Kwoddy, in further 

 illustration of his contention; and he expressed his belief in the pro- 

 bability of the derivation of Acadia from "the frequency of names 

 with this termination in the language of the natives," adding the 

 following passage in explanation of the probable method: 



The early settlers were desirous of information as to the localities of useful 

 productions, and in giving such information the aborigines would require so often 

 to use the term "Cadie," that it might very naturally come to be regarded as a 

 general name for the country. 



This treatment of the subject was not altered by Dawson in the 

 third and fourth editions of his work. It was reprinted in the Canadian 

 Antiquarian, V, 1876, 84. 



Meantime, Rand appears to have communicated a similar view 

 to various inquirers, for, although I cannot find the material in any 

 of his published works, he is the accredited authority for the meaning 

 "place of plenty" assigned to acadie in Ballard's account of the name 

 Passamaquoddy in the Report of the United States Coast Survey for 

 1868, 255. Also he is as obviously the authority for place-names cited 

 by P. C. Bliss in support of Gesner's meaning "place" in Collections 

 of the Maine Historical Society, I, reprint of 1865, 27; (also the same, 

 second series, I, 1869, 234). 



