48 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
who are economically interested in sport. But the highest of all argu- 
ments in favour of sanctuaries is that they will soon be the only places 
where the spell of Nature will have any force at all. And it is good 
for man to feel this penetrating spell from time to time. It is good, 
even if only for the one reason that anything with a touch of native 
distinction is worth preserving from those dull levellers who think it 
so progressive to make everything disgustingly like everything else. 
We cannot live without bread or dollars—granted, and with both hands. 
But man no more lives by dollars alone than he lives by bread alone. 
And if he is to have any spot left on the face of the Earth where he 
can refresh his soul by communion with a world different from his 
artificial own, he must establish sanctuaries. 
And sanctuaries, to be worth while, must be really sanctuaries. 
Let us make up our minds about those parts of wild Nature that should 
be absolutely set apart from exploitation, in exactly the same way as 
we make up our minds that a certain part of our time and money and 
attention is better spent on the soul and spirit of our life rather than 
on its material body. So we should take most of our forests for timber, 
most of our waterfalls for use as “white coal,’ most of our land for 
farming, and most of our wilds for food, fur or sport. But there cannot 
be a shadow of a doubt that we should greatly enrich our lives as a 
whole, and the exaltable side of them in particular, by leaving a few 
wild spots in Nature’s keeping. And if someone should object that, 
after all, these wilds and their appeal are only for the few, I should 
point to the ever-increasing public who delight in the call of the wild, 
even though they may only have heard it through word and picture. 
And, finally, if it should be objected that no natural products could, 
under any circumstances, do as good service to man in a sanctuary 
as in the way of trade, I should point to the worst of forests and ask 
whether it is not serving a higher purpose on its native soil than when 
it is converted into the best of pulpwood for the Yellow Press. 
The Laurentian waters have many a place well fitted for a sanc- 
tuary:—in Newfoundland, on the Magdalens, Bird Rocks and Bona- 
venture Island; along the North Shore in several spots, from the sea 
to the Saguenay; and, again, on Lakes Huron and Superior. My own, 
if I could make one, should be along some great reach of northern 
coastline, far down the Lower St. Lawrence. 
Here I would have seals and whales of all kinds, from the common 
but timid little harbour seal to the big horse-heads and the gigantic 
hooded seals, the grizzlies of the water; and from the smallest of all 
whales, the twenty-foot little white whale, miscalled the porpoise, all 
the way up to the “right” or Greenland whale, big as any monster 
of old romance. The white whales are still comparatively plentiful 
