The Natural History of the 

 Toronto Region 



CHAPTER I. 



TORONTO: AN HISTORICAL AND 

 DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH 



By 

 DAVID REID KEYS, M.A., 



University College, University of Toronto 



WHEN that genial and versatile geologist, the late 

 N. S. Shaler, wrote the history of his native State, 

 Kentucky, he drew attention to the peculiar position 

 it held among the American commonwealths. Ken- 

 tucky alone, he said, is the child of another common- 

 wealth, Virginia, and owes the majority of her early 

 inhabitants to the soldiers disbanded at the close of 

 the American revolutionary war. In the same man- 

 ner, and almost to the same extent, the first settlers 

 in Upper Canada, as it was then called, were the 

 loyalist soldiers of the British army, and the other 

 U. E. Loyalists whose devotion to a lost cause led 

 them to prefer expatriation to life under a new flag. 

 To make the parallel still more exact, not a few of 

 these sturdy loyalists came from Virginia and 

 founded some of the first families of our province. 

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