242 LAHONTAN. 



men, and men for women ; naked persons for those that are clothed, 

 and e contra. As for the maps," he adds, " the reader will find them 

 very exact; and I have taken care to have the tracks of my voyages 

 more nicely delineated than in the original." 



About the same period too, the public mind had been roused by 

 accounts of recent additional discoveries on the great continent of 

 North America. In Thevenot's Collection of Travels, published at 

 Paris in 1681, there was an account of the discoveries of Marquette. 

 In 1683, Louis Hennepin had published, also at Paris, his " Descripr 

 tion de la Louisiane au sud-ouest de la Nonvelle France, avec la carte 

 du pays, les moeurs et la maniere de vivre des Sauvages. Paris, Seb. 

 Hure. 1683 ; " and in 1697 the same writer had put forth at Utrecht 

 his " Nouvelle Decouverte d' un tr^s-grand Pays situ6 dans I'Amerique, 

 entre le Nouveau Mexique et la Mer Glaciale ; " and in the following 

 year, at the same place, appeared his " Nouveau Voyage d'un pays 

 plus grande que I'Burope entre les Mers du Sud et du Nord, avec les 

 Moeurs et Manieres de vivre des Sauvages." In 1697 also, Tonti's 

 " Narrative of La Salle's Descent of the Mississippi to its Mouth," 

 appeared at Paris. These works were doubtless meeting with a sale 

 that was deemed large in those days, and were making no small stir. 

 More matter of the kind indicated by the foregoing titles, would be 

 calculated to meet with acceptance. Lahontan accordingly, in addi- 

 tion to an account of events in Canada from 1683 to 1694, admits into 

 his work a highly dressed-up narrative of an excursion of his own up 

 one of the northern branches or affluents of the Mississippi; a narrative 

 which he makes the vehicle of a variety of reports of people and places, . 

 of new lakes and seas to the south and west, collected from Indians 

 casually met with by himself in his expedition. It is the letter or 

 chapter which contains this particular narrative, that has brought a 

 degree of discredit upon Lahontan, and caused other parts of his book, 

 to which no particular improbability attaches, to be questioned. 



It would seem as if his informants up the Long River, as the branch 

 of the Mississippi which he is said to have explored was called, meeting 

 with a person apparently easy of belief, had in some instances fooled 

 him probably as they thought, to the top of his bent ; and only too 

 faithfully did Lahontan transfuse into his pages the spirit of the 

 fabulists whom he encountered. 



By evil communications with the lagoos of the Red men, he came 

 to be classed among lagoos himself, more completely than he perhaps 

 in reality deserves. 



