CANADIAN ENVIRONMENT OF THE OUANANICHE 123 



The ethnography of the Eskimo and Indian inhabi- 

 tants of Labrador is most curious and fascinating. For 

 some of them a partial descent from old Iberian stock 

 has been claimed, their Basque and other European 

 progenitors having, in all probability, gone the way 

 of the early Norse settlers in Greenland, who are be- 

 lieved to have become incorporated with the Eskimos.* 



The Montagnais are the most interesting of Cana- 

 dian Indians and a racial curiosity. Their folk-lore 

 is exceedingly rich, and they make splendid guides 

 for the camper, the canoeist, and the angler in search 

 of new and by white men untrodden and hitherto 

 undiscovered trails through the forests and over the 

 waterways of their far northern wilderness home. 

 Their hunting-grounds comprise the entire Labrador 

 peninsula, with the exception of that narrow strip of 

 civilization in the Province of Quebec that hugs the 

 St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, and generally ex- 

 tends but as many leagues inland as you may count 

 upon the fingers of your hands. This belt of civili- 



De Courcy, in his History of the Church in America, for subsequent 

 remarkable climatic changes in these northern latitudes, which 

 Lorenzo Burge, in his Pre-Glacial Man, attributes, following the 

 hypothesis of Figuier, to so natural a cause as the precession of 

 the equinoxes, producing a grand year of 21,000 years, with a great 

 winter lasting 10,500 years for each of the poles in rotation. That 

 which the north pole is at present enjoying is supposed to have 

 commenced its approach after 1248 B.C., when that pole attained 

 its maximum summer duration, and this great season of cold is, we 

 are told, to continue to the year 7388 of our era before attaining 

 its extreme limit. Humboldt and Rink, however, are among 

 those who believe that there has been no material climatic change 

 in Greenland since the Norse days. 

 * Rink's Danish Greenland. 



