162 A PAPER—BY WM. GOSSIP: 
menced his journey northward for aught we shall ever know, in 
the second generation of the human family. He made his 
utensils and his weapons out of wood and stone after the most 
simple process when he had attained to it. The hammer, the 
knife and the tomahawk must have been to him masterpieces of 
adaptation and human ingenuity. The spear, the sling, and 
bow and arrow followed, and were his weapons of offence and 
defence, upon which he mainly relied to procure sustenance. In 
these he gained some mechanical proficiency, but never was much 
of an inventive animal. The stars guided him to his destination 
and the chase supplied his wants. He learned to fashion a canoe, 
rude enough it must have been in those early days, by which, 
however, he crossed lakes and rivers, and frail as it was, and is, 
became an adept in its management, and at last adventured on a 
sea voyage, but he never understood the principle of the keel or 
the rudder. With the canoe however, he was equal to any fate 
that might befall him, and it were doubtful if he could have 
reached this continent without it. I believe that he was the first 
human being that arrived on the northern part of this western 
land, and having no enemies to contend with, and plentiful sus- 
tenance, he increased and multiplied, and became at length what 
the Algonkins are at the present day, the most numerous of its 
aboriginal families. He, that is his ancestry, left the site of man’s 
creation evidently before cattle were used by man, or beasts were 
subdued to his training. 
One of the best evidences of the vast antiquity of the Algonkin 
race is the comparative purity of their religious belief, which 
must. have been also that of the Adam, of Enoch, of Noah. They 
worshipped the Great Spirit, the Author and Controller of all 
things, and added to their creed the doctrine of the immortality 
of man’s nature. ‘True, in the course of the many thousand years 
of his development, his simple nature has been imposed upon by 
crafty and designing contrivances of his fellows, who have per- 
verted his imagination by attributing to themselves supernatural 
powers, and complicated his belief, by grotesque and hideous 
“ceremonies ; but he has never lost sight of the pure theism, which 
had impressed the minds of his remotest ancestry, and his depen- 
