72 TRANSACTIONS iSqQ-'oO 



up of two varieties of soil : (i) a belt of rich cla3^s, bordering on 

 both shores of the River St. Lawrence ; (2 ) a belt of poor sands, 

 bordering on the mountain ranges. 



The Hurons of Lorette, though still within the ilat, or cham- 

 paign region, are not on its inner, fertile zone, but on its outer 

 sandy zone. At their village, called Indian, or Jeune I^orette, 

 the line of demarcation between the two zones is very apparent. 

 Here the River St. Charles passes through a steep and narrow 

 gorge, to a lower level. From the terrace on which Jeune I^or- 

 ette stands, if we look down the course of the St. Charles, there 

 appear to us on the dark rich loams, in close succession, the farms 

 of St. Ambroise, Ancienne Lorette, Charlesbourg, Ste. Foye and 

 Beauport. On the contrar3\ should we turn northward and 

 ascend the course of the St. Charles, farms would no longer 

 be observed on the sandy riverside, but instead an after- 

 growth of spruces, and the summer villas of some professional 

 men of Quebec. 



At Caughnawaga, nine miles from Montreal, on the opposite 

 shore of the St. lyawrence, where thrives a community of some 

 2000 Iroquois, the phj^sical conditions are not at all similar to 

 those amid which the Hurons of lyorette have been made to de- 

 velop. In fact they are almost the complete reverse. 



The champaign region, and, with it, its iiuier fertile belt of 

 marine clays, on both banks of the St. L,awrence, increase rapidly 

 in width as we proceed from Quebec to Montreal. In a general 

 way these are described by Canadian geologists as covering a tri- 

 angular area, the apex of which is towards Quebec, while the 

 base runs from Ottawa to the head of lyake Champlain. It will 

 thus be seen that Caughnawaga stands in the centre of a wide 

 plain, is surrounded on all sides by a flat country provided with 

 a rich soil. 



It may be added that the mountainous region which bounds 

 the plain to the South-East, is of slight altitude, and underlaid 

 not by very hard granites and schists, like those of the I^aur- 

 entian formation, but by softer rocks, limestones and slates, of 

 the Cambrian and Silurian series, which by weathering have 

 yielded abundant and generally rich soils. So that wide ranges 

 of this mountainous country are well adapted for farming and at 

 an early date were taken possession of by agricultural settlers.. 



