46 QUEEN'S QUARTERLY. 



ments, whose language is dying or is dead, whose blood is becoming 

 undistinguishably mingled with that of other races. The knowledge 

 of the history and the migrations of such tribes must therefore be 

 recovered from the study of the names of places which they once 

 inhabited, from the names of the hills which they fortified, of the 

 rivers by which they dwelt, of the land they tilled and claimed as 

 their own against intruders, of the distant mountains upon which 

 they gazed. It is from such a study of local names applied to 

 France and England that we wish to retrace a genealogy of their 

 people from other races, but mainly the Celtic, Teutonic and Scan- 

 dinavian stocks, although we may briefly refer to the highlanders 

 of France. 



It has been remarked that, among the mountains, the botanist 

 and the ethnologist meet with analogous phenomena. The lowland 

 flora of the glacial epoch has retreated to the Alps and the Pyrenees. 

 In like manner, we find that the hills contain the ethnological sur- 

 vivors of the plains. Mountain fastnesses have always formed a 

 providential refuge for conquered tribes. The narrow valleys which 

 penetrate into the great chains are well adapted to preserve for a 

 time the isolation of unrelated tribes of refugees, to hinder the inter- 

 mixture of race, and thus preserve from extermination or absorption 

 those who should afterwards, at the right time, blend gradually with 

 the conquerors of the plains, and supplement their moral and intel- 

 lectual deficiencies. In the Pyrenees we find the descendants of the 

 Euskarians or Basques, who have been driven from the lowlands of 

 France and Spain, and number to-day one million souls. An inspec- 

 tion of the map of France will show that the Cevennes and the 

 Alps together with the former province of Aquitaine retain a greater 

 number of Iberic names than the adjacent districts, the hills having 

 long served as a barrier to protect from the better armed Romans, 

 Franks or Normans that dark-eyed, dark-haired, short-statured race 

 still prevalent there, as in South Wales, the West of Ireland, South- 

 ern Brittany and in the region around Bordeaux. 



The name Canada is very like Spanish, indeed, if pronounced with the mid- 

 dle syllable accented, and anyone familiar with old Spanish maps and early 

 Spanish map-making will find it a more reasonable supposition, that 'Tierra 

 Canada=land canyoned or gullied, or ' Tierra de la Canada '=land of the 

 valley or gorge, was noted on the map of an early historic Spanish voyage 

 from the West Indies up the Atlantic coast and into the Gulf of St. Law- 

 rence. Such original and authoritative maps were properly held to be of 

 great value, and, when copied for subsequent navigators, the notes made 

 upon them became part of the new maps, and thus the nomenclature was 

 perpetuated. 



