accurate knowledge of plants, their properties, and their relation to the soil and to each other. “Here,” said he, “is a wood of red oak, when it is grubbed up this will be loam and sand, and make good Indian corn ground. This chestnut wood abounds with strawberries, and is the very best soil for wheat. The poplar wood, yonder, is not worth clearing—the soil is always wet and cold. There is a hickory wood, where the soil is always rich and deep, and does not run out; such and such plants that dye blue or orange, grow under it.” This is merely a slight epitome of the wide views of nature, that are laid open to these people from their very infancy—the acquisition of this kind of knowledge being one of their first amusements; yet those who were capable of astonishing you by the extent and variety of this local skill, in objects so varied and so complicated, never heard of a petal, corolla, or stigma in their lives, nor even of the strata of that soil, with the productions and properties of which they were so intimately acquainted. Without compass or guide of any kind, the traders steered through these pathless forests. In those gloomy days, when the sun is not visible, or in winter, when the falling snows obscured his beams, they made an incision in the bark on the different sides of a tree; that on the north was invariably thicker than the other, and covered with moss in much greater quantity: and this never-failing indication of the polar influence, was to those sagacious travellers a sufficient guide. They had, indeed, several subordinate monitors. Knowing, so well as they did, the quality of the soil, by the trees or plants most prevalent, they could avoid a swamp, or approach with certainty to a river or high ground, if such was their wish, by means, that to us would seem incomprehensible. Even the savages seldom visited these districts, except in the dead of winter; they had towns, as they called their summer dwellings, on the banks of the lakes and rivers in the interior, where their great fishing places were. In the winter, their grand hunting parties were in places more remote from our boundaries, where the deer and other larger animals took shelter from the neighbourhood of man. These single adventurers sought the Indians in their spring haunts, as soon as the rivers were open; there they had new dangers to apprehend. It is well known that among the natives of America, revenge was actually a virtue, and retaliation a positive duty. While faith was kept with these people they never became aggressors; but the Europeans, by the force of bad example and strong liquors, seduced them from their wonted probity. Yet, from the first, their notion of justice and revenge was of that vague and general nature, that if they considered themselves injured, or if one of their tribe had been killed by an inhabitant of any one of our settlements, they considered any individual of our nation as a proper subject for retribution.