NATURAL HISTORY, TORONTO REGION 
and Applied Science had last year 4,136 students 
and 432 members on its teaching staff. 
This wonderful advance in the field of higher edu- 
cation, appealing as it will to the scientific reader, 
may be taken as typical of the material growth of 
the city. That growth has been largely the result 
of the policy of protection brought in under Sir John 
A. Macdonald in 1878, which gave an immense im- 
petus to manufacturing in Toronto. In 1881 the 
population was 82,000, and in 1891 it had grown to 
181,000. Germany itself could scarcely show more 
rapid progress. Would that Toronto had followed 
the German system of extension and town planning! 
With the wastefulness characteristic of the American 
continent, an area almost as large as that of Paris 
was paved and drained. The natural result followed, 
and during the next ten years the city only grew to 
208,000, the boom having burst early in the decade. 
With the turn of the century came a change. Sir 
Wilfrid Laurier’s epigram that the twentieth century 
was to be Canada’s seems to have won favour “ there 
where the will and the power are one.” A series of 
events brought Canada into the public eye. The 
British preference did as much for the increase of 
British immigration as it did for British trade. At 
the same time the tide of American immigrants 
flowed across from the Western States in constantly 
increasing volume. From the European continent, 
too, a flood of foreigners entered the Dominion, which 
has thus become the scene of a new “ Wandering of 
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