NATURAL HISTORY, TORONTO REGION 
During the first decade of the new century 
Toronto’s progress has been phenomenal. It has also 
been all-embracing. Millionaire manufacturers, suc- 
cessful merchants, retired farmers, half-pay officers, 
English gentlemen, Italian navvies, Polish push-cart 
vendors, Greek bootblacks, and such a polyglot horde 
from the Balkans that three thousand are said to have 
left for the seat of war last year—all these and many 
more have come to spend or gain a fortune in Toronto. 
After having been for a generation a miniature Bel- 
fast, with a tincture of Edinburgh and a tinge of 
Glasgow, Toronto bids fair to become a Canadian 
Chicago with an unassimilated foreign element that 
is both a burden and an incentive to the charitable 
organizations of the city. 
Nowhere is this change so apparent as in the dis- 
trict known for half a century as the “ ward,” and 
bounded by Queen, Yonge, College, and the Avenue. 
In the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign the late 
Chief Justice Macaulay used to walk across the fields 
from his residence near the present site of the Bishop 
Strachan School to the Court in Osgoode Hall. Fifty 
years ago it was quite built up and peopled almost 
entirely by North of Ireland immigrants, mostly 
members of the Orange order, and well represented 
in the City Council by the late Mayor Warring Ken- 
nedy and on the School Board by Mr. Frank Somers. 
At the present time the “ward” still retains at its 
diagonally opposite angles, N.E. and S.W., the relics 
of the munificence of the earliest landowners in the 
24 
