MIVAR T ON THE CA T. 143 



ing for their departure they set out well satisfied, and repairing to L'Orient, 

 embarked for home. DeBourgmont remained in France and was rewarded for 

 his great services to the company by being created a Knight of St. Louis. 



Upon the arrival of Capt. DuBois and party, at New Orleans, they were 

 grandly entertained at the expense of the company, which also furnished them 

 with a boat and boatmen to take them to Fort Orleans, where they arrived in due 

 course of time. There was great rejoicing among the Missouris to see their friends 

 return, and especially to see them possessed of more treasures than they had 

 before conceived of. Dances and games were inaugurated in the village and the 

 friendship existing between the French and Missouris seemed to be more strongly 

 cemented than ever. Mrs. DuBois lived at the fort with her husband, seemingly 

 happy in having adopted the customs of the whites. Such was the condition of 

 affairs when the boats that brought the party from New Orleans set out on their 

 return. Early in the following spring some traders from Kaskaskia came up the 

 river to trade with the Missouris, but on reaching their village found no evidence 

 of Fort Orleans except its blackened ruins. It had been given to the flames, 

 while the fate of its garrison had been the same as that of many other outposts. 

 Had a single victim been spared he would have probably told the familiar story 

 of treachery, surprise and massacre, ending in torture at the stake for those who 

 unfortunately escaped the first onslaught. But not a single Frenchman was spared, 

 and the history of the causes that led to the massacre, and the details of its exe- 

 cution will for ever remain unwritten. Madam DuBois was found by the traders 

 to be living with her own people, having renounced Christianity and resumed the 

 manners and customs of her people. She has been thought by some to have 

 been in some way connected with the massacre. Several years later she married 

 a captain in the French service, named Marin, and in 1751 a daughter by this 

 marriage was living at Kaskaskia. Fort Orleans was the first and last French 

 post in the country of the Missouris. 



BIOLOGY. 



MIVART ON THE CAT. 



The great advances that have been made in biology — the science which 

 treats of all living organisms from man to the lowest plant — and the important 

 changes that have been wrought in men's minds in consequence, have impressed 

 Dr. Mivart with the conviction that the natural history of animals and plants 

 needs to be rewritten, and the field of nature surveyed from a new stand-point. 

 In the preparation of such a history two ways were open — either to begin with 

 the lowliest and most simply organized of living creatures, and gradually ascend to 



