A PBELIMINARY OAST xiii 



well as access to valuable old manuscripts relating to 

 their tribal characteristics. That these original sources 

 of information should have been so long overlooked is no 

 doubt due to the fact that Schoolcraft, Morse, and other 

 students of the aboriginal races of America have confined 

 their researches almost entirely to the Indian tribes of 

 the United States and to those of southern and western 

 Canada. 



The chapter on the philology of the ouananiche is a 

 synopsis of a paper read for the author in May, 1894, by 

 George Stewart, LL.D., D.C.L., F.E.S.C., F.R.G.S., 

 before the Royal Society of Canada, wherein a plea for 

 the recognition of priority of nomenclature was made 

 the spelling "ouananiche, "for which the present writer 

 has vigorously and somewhat successfully contended for 

 more than a decade past, having been the earliest writ- 

 ten form of the Indian name. It has been employed 

 in French-Canadian literature from its very beginning, 

 despite the assertion that it is "a new word" by a pub- 

 licist who claims to have only heard it for the first time 

 in 1889. 



From his original intention of writing a simple angling 

 book, the author has permitted himself to drift, as an- 

 glers are accustomed to do upon these wide Northern 

 waters in their light birch-bark canoes, absorbed in their 

 favorite pastime and enraptured with the marvellous beau- 

 ty and attractiveness of the ever-changing surroundings, 

 until it has seemed to him desirable to deal with the 

 whole Canadian environment of the ouananiche as well 

 as with the fish itself, well aware that portions of such 

 environment are as little known, even to Canadians, as 

 is the interior of Africa. 



James Eussell Lowell, in his charmingly idyllic Intro- 

 duction to The Complete Angler, tells us that the contem- 



