506 A NOTE ON THE ETYMON OF ONTARIO. 



<leemed sacred ; although, according to the Jesuit Claude Allouez, it 

 may have been for other reasons: "Les Sauvages respectent ce lac 

 tjomme un Divinite ; et lui font des sacrifices, soit a cause de sa 

 grandeur, * * soit a cause de sa bonte, fouruissant du poisson, qui 

 nourrit tons ces pcuples au defaut de la chasse, qui est rare aux 

 environs," (Rel. 1667-8.) We may congratulate ourselves that this 

 lake did not retain the name "Lake Tracy," which was once conferred 

 •upon it in honour of the Marquis de Tracy, a Viceroy of Louis XIV,, 

 in 1665, — in whose time Mr. F. X. Garneau (History of Canada, 

 i. 216,) informs us, horses were first imported into Canada. Father 

 Claude Allouez speaks of it under this name (anno 1667), and in the 

 map given by Bancroft in his History of the United States (vol. iii. 

 153), it is marked Lac Tracy ou Superieur. Du Creux simply 

 Latinizes it Lacus Superior, which, though denoting vaguely the 

 " Upper Lake," has produced the name which has such a grand 

 sound in our ears, in comparison with which "Lake Tracy" seems a 

 kind of bathos, somewhat similar to that which presents itself on the 

 maps in those very unpoetic designations of two conspicuous peaks of 

 the Rocky Mountains — Mount Brown and Mount Hooker. Cham- 

 plain gives the name of Lake Superior as Grand Lac — a literal 

 translation of Gitche-Gumee, 



1 now return to our own lake and its appellation. I have said that 

 it is generally received to mean Beautiful ; but on comparing the 

 title borne by this lake in several of the old maps with the nams 

 of a celebrated aboriginal tribe once inhabiting its southern shore, 

 and bearing in mind the tendency which has evinced itself in other 

 instances to describe lakes by the names of neighboring tribes, it has 

 struck me that another interpretation of Ontario is more probable ; 

 and that its supposed signification of "Beautiful" — if that sense can 

 be traced in its composition at all — is perhaps as fanciful as the dis- 

 covery of aopvi<s bird-less, in the Phoenician Avernus, indicating in 

 reality, we are told, nothing relating to " birds," but the gloom and 

 darkness characteristic of a volcanic crater. 



Du Creux gives, as I have said, Lacus Oiitarius and Lacus Ouen- 

 taronius. Now I think this last term Lacus Ouentaronius comes the 

 nearest to the name intended to be expressed by Ontario ; that it, in 

 fact, contains the original of Ontario. 



On the map given by Brodhead in his History of the State of New 

 York, 1609-1664, the name borne by our lake in 1615 was "Lac dea 



