36 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
on to make it wholly so. There might, then, be at least something 
more or less in harmony with itself. Why should not all the islands, 
buildings, boats and everything else that can be labelled, be appro- 
priately marked with the net cash prices paid for them? This would 
save so much art criticism! Would it not, indeed, be the very last 
word of all criticism? 
V. The five great Laurentian lakes are so immeasurably greater 
than any other lakes in the world that when you say, simply, “The 
Great Lakes,” you are universally understood to mean these and no 
others. Except for mountain shores with snow-crowned summits, such 
as enfold many a lake in the Alps and Rockies, they lack no element 
of grandeur. Their triumphal march takes them through hill and 
plain, wilderness and cities; while the charge of their hosts shakes the 
very earth at Niagara, and shows their might to all her peoples. 
It is hard to realize now that Niagara was never seen by a white 
man till nearly two centuries after John Cabot first set foot on Lauren- 
tian soil. The Falls were never heard of by the earliest discoverers. 
Then iney became a rumour, a name, a mystery, an object of wonder 
and desire. The Senecas who lived near them were as fierce as their 
rapids, and the French pioneers kept aloof. Even so late as 1669 
La Salle only heard their thunderous roar, without seeing them, as 
he passed by on his way to the West; and it was not till nine years 
later that he stood among the four white men who had the first view 
of this stupendous work of Nature. 
Lake Huron is the second wonder of the Lakes; and not a modern 
scenic wonder only; for the Great Spirit, the Manitou, has always 
taken up his abode upon the island called after him whenever he has 
come to earth. Georgian Bay is almost another Great Lake, and con- 
tains not thousands but tens of thousands of islands. Yet this mere 
size is nothing to the beauty of sky and pellucid water on a still mid- 
summer afternoon; when the Huronian blue of each seems to blend 
into a third and more ethereal element, light as the air yet buoyant as 
the water, in which canoes seem, fairy-like, afloat between them. 
The third wonder is Lake Superior, a clear, cool, blue immensity 
and sheer depth of waters like the sea. Its surface is six hundred feet 
above the Atlantic, but its bottom has soundings as much again below. 
Its north shore is a crescent of stern and wild Laurentians, as high as 
the Saguenay’s and hundreds of miles long. And, as the St. Lawrence 
fronts the ocean with portals that can be plainly made out from the 
deck of a ship a whole degree away, so here, two thousand miles inland, 
it has another and an inner gateway to a farther west, in the huge 
lion-like mass of Thunder Cape, a second Gibraltar in size and strength 
and actual form. 
