1889-90.] TWENTY-SECOND MEETING. 33 



TWENTY-SECOND MEETING. 



Twenty-second Meeting, 12th April, 1890, the President in the chair. 



Donations and Exchanges since last meeting, 68. 



Rev. J. F. Latimer was elected a member. 



On motion of Mr. VanderSmissen, seconded by Mr. Bain, it was resolved, 

 " That this Institute has learned with profound sorrow of the sudden 

 death of Alexander Marling, Esq., LL.B., for many years a zealous 

 member and efficient and faithful office-bearer, and desires to express its 

 sense of this great loss sustained by the Institute in particular and also by 

 the whole Province of Ontario which he has served so faithfully and well 

 and the sympathy of all members of the Institute with his sorrowing 

 children and relatives, and that the secretary be instructed to transmit a 

 copy of this resolution to his family." 



Mr. A. F. Chamberlain, M.A., read a paper on "The American Indian 

 in Literature." 



After referring briefly to the treatment of the American Indian in 

 fiction, with which he proposed to deal on a future occasion, the reader 

 proceeded to discuss the American Indian as he is presented to us in the 

 works of the poets of America and of Europe. First in chronological 

 order as well as in importance (excepting a few notices of earlier writers) 

 comes Shakespeare, in whose plays references to America, the West 

 Indies, Mexico, Guiana, and the Bermudas are to be found. A passage 

 relating to the " canibales " and the " antropophagus," which occurs in 

 " Othello," carries us to the New World. But it is in Caliban in the 

 " Tempest " that Shakespeare is most intimately concerned with America, 

 for the ultimate conception of that strange being is to be found in the 

 second hand information regarding the aborigines of the new continent 

 that was at the disposal of the Elizabethian courtier and poet. Caliban 

 itself is by most considered a metathesis of canibal, a word that preserves 

 to us, in disguise, the name of a fierce Indian people of the Spanish 

 Main. After briefly examining the character of Caliban, the reader took 

 up some few isolated references to America and its aborigines in the works 

 of Spenser, Jonson, and other contemporaries and successors of the 

 great dramatist. 



" The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru," by Sir William Davenant 

 (1658), in which several Indian characters occur, and not a few spirited 

 passages are to be found, was briefly referred to. After touching upon 

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