And so the Federal Government, as one of their earliest concerns, set to work on a sort of scientific stock-taking—a process that is still in full blast. They got together all the good scientists they could lay their hands on—geologists, mineralogists, geographers, botanists, naturalists, chemists, meteorologists, ethnologists and the like—and hustled them off to find out all they could about Canada; and, since that sort of person is born rather than made, the Federal Government early found themselves confronting a shortage of human material—a kind of famine of scientists—which was the more regrettable since there was so much ground to be covered, such appalling arrears to overtake. However, recruits were imported, and educational facilities were provided for the rising generation of professors, and to-day there are in the Government service of Canada as fine and mobile an army of scientific men as, I imagine, could anywhere be found on this planet. It makes one almost giddy to think of all those Government geologists hurrying every year across the country—one to study the economic minerals of New Brunswick, another to visit the goldfields of British Columbia, a third to tabulate the copper-bearing rocks of Sherbrooke, a fourth to visit the mica mines of Hudson Strait, a fifth to scrutinise the surface geology of the Great Plains, a sixth to collect facts about tin-bearing strata in Nova Scotia, a seventh to explore the raised shore-lines of the Blue Mountain escarpment. Some have been packed off at a moment’s notice—for example, to inspect a collapsing mountain (the people living at the base having become anxious), and to report upon a meteorite that had just fallen in somebody’s homestead (and which, when the scientist arrived, had already been sold for two hundred dollars). It does one’s heart good to think of the stream of scientists, booty laden and full of enthusiasm, returning at the end of the season: the triumphant mineralogist, with his diamond-bearing chromite, his apatite crystals, and his pink scapolite; the zealous zoologist, with eggs of the chickadee and the belted kingfisher, some rare fresh-water mussels, an albino skunk, and scores of marine fishes in alcohol; the brother naturalist, with treasure unthinkable of seaslugs, toads, and seaworms; the ethnologist, with his human skulls and bones, and his stone adzes and hammers; the perspiring palæontologist, with goodly parcels of fossil bryozoa, supplemented, it may be, by the tail of a scarce trilobite and the right posterior molar tooth of a ruminant belonging to the order Ovibos.