NATURAL HISTORY, TORONTO REGION 



During the first decade of the new century 

 Toronto's progress has been phenomenal. It has also 

 been all-embracing. Millionaire manufacturers, suc- 

 cessful merchants, retired farmers, half-pay officers, 

 English gentlemen, Italian navvies, Polish push-cart 

 vendors, Greek bootblacks, and such a polyglot hordo 

 from the Balkans that three thousand are said to have 

 left for the seat of war last year all these and many 

 more have come to spend or gain a fortune in Toronto. 

 After having been for a generation a miniature Bel- 

 fast, with a tincture of Edinburgh and a tinge of 

 Glasgow, Toronto bids fair to become a Canadian 

 Chicago with an unassimilated foreign element that 

 is both a burden and an incentive to the charitable 

 organizations of the city. 



Nowhere is this change so apparent as in the dis- 

 trict known for half a century as the " ward," and 

 bounded by Queen, Yonge, College, and the Avenue. 

 In the early days of Queen Victoria's reign the late 

 Chief Justice Macaulay used to walk across the fields 

 from his residence near the present site of the Bishop 

 Strachan School to the Court in Osgoode Hall. Fifty 

 years ago it was quite built up and peopled almost 

 entirely by North of Ireland immigrants, mostly 

 members of the Orange order, and well represented 

 in the City Council by the late Mayor Warring Ken- 

 nedy and on the School Board by Mr. Frank Somers. 

 At the present time the " ward " still retains at its 

 diagonally opposite angles, N.E. and S.W., the relics 

 of the munificence of the earliest landowners in the 

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