Professor Hind, who spent two summers in the country in charge of an expedition sent out by the Canadian Government, writes: “The basin of Lake Winnipeg extends over twenty-eight degrees of longitude, and ten degrees of latitude. The elevation of its eastern boundary, at the Prairie Portage, 104 miles west of Lake Superior, is 1480 feet above the sea, and the height of land at the Vermillion Pass is less than 5000 feet above the same level. The mean length of this great inland basin is about 920 English miles, and its mean breadth 380 miles; hence its area is approximately 360,000 square miles, or a little more than that of Canada. “Lake Winnipeg, at an altitude of 628 feet above the sea, occupies the lowest depression of this great inland basin, covering with its associated lakes, Manitobah, Winnipegosis, Dauphin, and St. Martin, an area slightly exceeding 13,000 square miles, or nearly half as much of the earth’s surface as is occupied by Ireland. “The outlet of Lake Winnipeg is through the contracted and rocky channel of Nelson River, which flows into Hudson’s Bay. “The country, possessing a mean elevation of 100 feet above Lake Winnipeg, is very closely represented by the outline of Pembina Mountain, forming part of the eastern limit of the cretaceous series in the north-west of America. “The area occupied by this low country, which includes a large part of the valley of Red River, the Assiniboine, and the main Saskatchewan, may be estimated at 70,000 square miles, of which nine-tenths are lakes, marsh, or surface rock of Silurian or Devonian age, and, generally so thinly covered with soil as to be unfit for cultivation, except in small isolated areas. “Succeeding this low region there are the narrow terraces of the Pembina Mountain, which rise in abrupt steps, except in the valleys of the Assiniboine, Valley River, Swan River, and Red Deer’s River, to the level of a higher plateau, whose eastern limit is formed by the precipitous escarpments of the Riding, Duck, and Porcupine Mountains, with the detached outliers, Turtle, Thunder, and Pasquia Mountains. This is the great _prairie plateau_ of Rupert’s Land; it is bounded towards the south-west and west by the Grand Coteau de Missouri, and the extension of the tableland between the two branches of the Saskatchewan, which forms the eastern limit of the _plains_ of the north-west. The area of the prairie plateau, in the basin of Lake Winnipeg, is about 120,000 square miles; it possesses a mean elevation of 1100 feet above the sea.