446 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



year 1603 he have two forms of the name Acadie, the La Cadie of an 

 official French document, and the Arcadie of the narrative of Cham- 

 plain, the experienced and competent geographer. Going still farther 

 backward, I have found the name in but a single book, and that is 

 in the Cosmographie universelle of Thevet of 1575, where it also appears 

 as Arcadie (translation in the Magazine of American History, VIII, 

 1882, 133). Thevet had, however, no original knowledge of this 

 region, and must have taken the word from some map. Upon the 

 maps of the time, the word does indeed appear many tim.es, as I have 

 already shown in these Transactions, II, 1896, ii, 216; VII, 1901, ii, 

 161. As an example we may take the Zaltieri map of 1566, printed 

 in the Transactions last cited, 163, upon which, on a peninsula lying 

 between R. S. Lorenzo and R. Fondo (clearly the St. Lawrence and the 

 Bay of Fundy), is printed Larcadia, in the same type as is used for 

 other large territorial divisions, such as Labrador and Florida. The 

 same usage is found in many other maps, notably in the Globe of 

 Franciscus Bassus of 1570, which has Arcadia, {Kretschmer's Atlas, 

 XXIX) and on the map of about 1560 forming No. 13 in Muller's 

 Remarkable Maps; and it occurs also, as Arcadia or Larcadia, either 

 as a territorial or a local name, on maps by Porcacchi of 1575, by 

 Bertelli of 1560, by Ruscelli of 1561, and several others. The very 

 earliest map on which it is known to occur is the map of New France 

 contributed to Ptolemy's Geography of 1548 by Gastaldi, of which a 

 sketch is given by Winsor in his Narrative and Critical History of 

 America, IV, 88. The essential correctness of that sketch, with its 

 spelling of Larcadia, I have confirmed by comparison with an original 

 in the Lenox Library. 



The fact that the name Acadie thus goes back in an unbroken 

 line to the Larcadia of these very early maps has not escaped the 

 notice of students, for Kohl, in his well-known work on the discovery 

 of Maine, comments on its appearance on the Ruscelli Map of 1561 

 (Collections of the Maine Historical Society, second series, 1869, I, 

 234); Slafter, in his scholarly annotations to the Prince Society Cham- 

 plain, II, 73, mentions its occurrence on the Gastaldi map of 1548; 

 and Bourinot, comments to like effect (these l^ransactions, V, 1899, 

 ii, 4), all of these authors, by the way, accepting an Indian origin of 

 the word. But the occurrence of the name on maps of such early date 

 seems to me quite fatal to the possibility of an Indian origin. In the 

 first place, as the name goes back at least to 1548, it long antedates 

 any settlement of any sort, and even any exploration except of the 

 most hurried character, quite insufficient to have given the voyagers 

 any idea of the frequency of the termination -acadie in the place- 

 names, or any opportunity to develop such knowledge into a place- 



