The Natural History of the 
Toronto Region 
CHAPTER I. 
TORONTO: AN HISTORICAL AND 
DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH 
By 
DAVID REID KEYS, M.A., 
University College, University of Toronto 
Wuen that genial and versatile geologist, the late 
N.S. Shaler, wrote the history of his native State, 
Kentucky, he drew attention to the peculiar position 
it held among the American commonwealths. Ken- 
tucky alone, he said, is the child of another common- 
wealth, Virginia, and owes the majority of her early 
inhabitants to the soldiers disbanded at the close of 
the American revolutionary war. In the same man- 
ner, and almost to the same extent, the first settlers 
in Upper Canada, as it was then called, were the 
loyalist soldiers of the British army, and the other 
U. E. Loyalists whose devotion to a lost cause led 
them to prefer expatriation to life under a new flag. 
To make the parallel still more exact, not a few of 
these sturdy loyalists came from Virginia and 
founded some of the first families of our province. 
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