The admission of British Columbia to the newly-formed Dominion of Canada in 1871, the last act of the great political drama alluded to above, was clogged with the condition that a railway should be constructed within ten years “from the Pacific to a point of junction with the existing railway systems in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.” The English, if chary of undertaking new responsibilities, are prompt in acting on them, and the authorities of Canada, now fully alive to the fact that they had to do in a few years what had been done by their neighbors in a half-century, lost not a moment in sending out engineers to survey the ground, and ascertain as rapidly as possible the best route for the promised line of communication. In 1872 the preliminary reports were laid before the Canadian House of Commons, and the same year Sandford Fleming, the engineer-in-chief of the line to be laid down, made an extensive exploration of the districts to be traversed, which added greatly to the general knowledge of the course of the Saskatchewan, Athabasca, and other rivers west of the Great Lakes. This report has been followed by others not less important, and indeed the lengthened survey over which Mr. Fleming presides has become almost as valuable to the geographer as to the statesman and the colonist in its results. In the month of February, 1875, the source of the Fraser River was found by Mr. E. W. Jarvis, “in a semi-circular basin, completely closed in by glaciers and high, bare peaks, at an elevation of 5,300 feet;” and we can scarcely refuse this fearless traveler a place among our heroes, when we read of nine hundred miles traveled on snow-shoes, the thermometer often being “below the temperature of freezing mercury,” or learn that he “lived the last three days on the anticipation of a meal at his journey’s end.” This same year, 1875, was still further signalized as being that in which the Saskatchewan was first navigated by steam, for in that year a ship of about 200 tons ascended from the Great Rapid to Edmonton, 700 miles higher, and now we learn that this great river is navigated from the neighborhood of Lake Winnipeg to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Illustration: FRASER RIVER.