648 REPORT— 1880. 



uniform area, and farms of uniform acreage. The law requires that the eastern 

 and western boundaries of every township be true astronomical meridians ; and that 

 the sphericity of the earth's figure be duly allowed for, so that the northern 

 boundary must be less in measurement than the southern. All lines are required 

 to be gone over twice with chains of unequal length, and the land surveyors are 

 checked by astronomical determinations. In carrying out this operation, which 

 will be seen to he one of great nicety, tive principal meridians have been rigorously 

 determined, and in part traced — the 97tli, 102nd, 106th, 110th, and 114th; and 

 fourteen base-lines, connecting them, have been measured and marked. One of 

 these, on the parallel of 52' 10', is 183 miles long. Eleven astronomical stations 

 have been fixed since 1876, and from these sixty-six determinate points have been 

 fixed in latitude, forty-five in longitude, often under conditions of no little difficulty 

 from the severity of the climate. The claims of .Messrs. Alexander and Lindsay 

 Russell, of Mr. Aldous, and Mr. King, the observers, to rank as scientific travellers, 

 will, I am sure, be warmly recognised by this Section. 



The sources of the Frazer river were first reached in February 1875, and found 

 in a semicircular basin, completely closed in by glaciers and high bare peaks, at an 

 elevation of 5300 feet. The hardy discoverer, Mr. E. W. Jarvis, travelled in the 

 course of that exploration 900 miles on snow-shoes, mucli of it with the ther- 

 mometer below the temperature of freezing mercury, and lived for the last three 

 days, as he expresses it, ' on the anticipation of a meal at the journey's end.' 



We are still imperfectly acquainted with the region north of the parallel of 50° 

 in British Columbia, where the Canadian engineers have long been searching for a 

 practicable railway line from one or other of three known passes of the Rocky 

 Mountains proper, through the tremendous gorges of the Cascade Mountains, to the 

 Pacific. These passes are, the Yellowhead, at an elevation of 3645 feet, the Pine 

 river, at 2800 feet, and the Peace river, said to be only 1650 feet above the sea, all 

 of them comparing very favourably in respect to height with the other trans- 

 continental railways. The Union Pacific Railway, for example, runs, as you will 

 remember, for 1500 miles at elevations of over 4500 feet, and its summit level is 

 8242 feet. The Dominion Government has recently adopted a line from the 

 Yellowhead Pass to Burrard Inlet, which may be made out in any good map by 

 following the course of the Thompson and Frazer rivers. By this line the Pacific 

 coast will be reached in 1945 miles from Lake Superior, and it is already partly 

 under contract. This is not a place to enter upou engineering details. I will only 

 remark that greater difficulties have seldom been presented to human enterprise 

 than must here be conquered. That peculiar feature in physical geography, the 

 cafion or deep gorge, of which the Via Mala is an example familiar to many 

 persons, is presented all over the region upon a scale of grandeur unsurpassed. 

 When not perpendicular clift's, their sides are in these latitudes seamed by avalanches 

 on the largest scale ; while the mountain torrents which rush down them defj' navi- 

 gation. Mr. Jarvis describes how on one occasion having walked into a hole, con- 

 cealed by snow, the current caught his snow shoes, turning them upside down, and 

 held him like a vice, so that it required the united efforts of all his party to extri- 

 cate him. 



There is a curious circumstance mentioned in this gentleman's nan-ative which 

 deserves notice, as an instance of the successful reduction of a native language to 

 writing, free from the difiiculties which attend the use of the Roman alphabet. He 

 met with a kind of notice-board or finger-post at the dividing of two tracks on the 

 prairie, having upon it characters, which were entirely unknown to himself and 

 his companions, and apparently to the Railway Department : — 





^r '^V^ ^-xjyj „^ ;0:';.,L -j^l 



They are, in fact, characters of a phonetic alphabet, invented forty years ago by a 

 Mr. Evans, a Wesleyan missionary among the Cree Indians, and are extremely- 

 well adapted for expressing their liquid polysyllabic language. That they should 

 have survived the generation to which they were first taught, and be still used for 



