156 Canadian Record of Science. 
farming community at large, and within a reasonably short 
space of time, what would require many years to accom- 
plish if dependent upon individual enterprise and resources ; 
to prove the value of new varieties; to encourage forestry ; 
to test the value of fertilizing ingredients and soils; to dis- 
seminate agricultural information of all kinds; to encourage 
and direct. To this work scientific methods are necessarily 
applied. 
The institution is achieving, in its own way, results of 
the greatest value to the farming community, and through 
it to the country at large. The Director and his assistants 
are deserving liberal support at the hands of Government, 
and more particularly at the hands of the farmers them- 
selves. 
THE BIRDS OF QUEBEC. 
Abstract of a Popular Lecture delivered before the Natural History 
Society of Montreal on the 12th of March, 1891, by 
J. M. LeMornsn, Esa., F.R.S.C. 
Part I 
The earliest ornithological record in Canada—I might say, 
possibly in America—occurs in Jacques Cartier’s Voyages 
up the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In chapters ii, ili, vi, vii and 
xii of the narrative of his first voyage, in 1534, and chap- 
ter 1 of his second voyage, in 1535, as well as an entry in 
the log of Roberval’s first pilot, Jean Alphonse, in 1542, 
mention is made of the myriads of gannets, gulls, guille- 
mots, puffins, eider ducks, cormorants and other sea fowl 
nesting on the Bird Rocks and on the desolate isles off the 
Labrador coast. Jacques Cartier goes so far as to say that 
“the whole French navy might be freighted with these 
noisy denizens of that wild region without any apparent 
diminution in their number.” (Chap. i-ii, Voyages.) Re- 
liable modern naturalists—Dr. Henry Bryant, of Boston, 
visiting the Bird Rocks,in 1860,and Charles A.Cory in 1878— 
confirm these statements of early discoverers as to the 
number and species of birds to be found in the lower St. 
