160 A PAPER—BY WM. GOSSIP. 
speculations, and it may create some astonishment that a young 
Institution should challenge public attention by so bold a flight 
and in a spirit of deprecation I may say that it has not been 
frequently repeated, and that only in a few instances have we 
gone beyond our own Province for material to form the subjects 
of our Papers. 
As a member of the Ethnographic Section of the Nova Scotia 
Institute, however unworthy, I could not refrain from a par- 
ticular notice of Mr. Haliburton’s excelient Paper, of which we 
have so good reason to be proud. The Ethnology of our own 
Province is, however, a very attractive subject, and is of consider- 
able importance in connection with the history of mankind. I 
will shortly refer to it in connection with the aborigines of Nova 
Scotia. It may not be quite satisfactory to some who incline to 
the belief that varieties of mankind were created on this conti- 
‘nent, that it can be shewn that the Micmacs are not autochthones 
although I believe they are lineal descendants of the earliest 
forms of mankind, and amongst the first emigrants from the 
site of their creation, as they are probably the latest, though 
almost completly separated, Algonkin emigration from the old- 
est settlements of their tribe, with whom they afterwards main- 
tained a desultory acquaintance. With the restless spirit of 
their earliest wanderings they were in search of a better count- 
ry, or they may have been driven off by war or intestine com- 
motions. They undoubtedly came to Nova Scotia by way of 
the river and Gulf of St. Lawrence, and reached first Prince 
Edward Island, and settled themselves. They then spread to 
Cape Breton, where they still continue a wandering race, and 
must have crossed early to Newfoundland, where they came into 
contact with the Boethicks, with whom they were continually at 
war. They thus at length found the better country they were 
in quest of, and the peaceable land they sought, to which they 
gave the name of Acadia, which means in their language, “ the 
land of abundace.” They may have inhabited and prospered in 
it and multiplied, at least one thousand years before the arrival 
of the Europeans in America. 
I have never been able to discover whence the tribal name of 
