The city of Toronto, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, is built on the drift clays which have accumulated above the rocks of the Lower Silurian formation to an average depth of upwards of thirty feet, and in some places to more than seventy feet. The same overlying beds of boulder clay and drift-gravel extend with monotonous uniformity eastward from Lake Huron to the Ottawa; and throughout the lower valley of the St. Lawrence to Labrador. The traces of ancient life recovered from those Canadian glacial deposits, with very few exceptions, correspond to living species,—including Radiata, Mollusca, Articulata, and Vertebrata, now found in other latitudes. As might be anticipated, the older glacial beds indicate a more Arctic condition of life; and thus accord with other evidence in pointing to a gradual amelioration of climate in Northern America. But it is only in the boulder clay of the lower St. Lawrence that the palæontologist finds the fossils by means of which such conclusions are formed; and alongside of which it would be reasonable to anticipate traces of the presence of man. The construction of an esplanade along the margin of the Bay of Toronto, during recent years, exposed a cutting of upwards of two miles in length, and laid bare the virgin soil of the most populous site now devoted to the civilising processes of European colonisation in Upper Canada. The same drift clay and gravel have been exposed in numerous other excavations, but hitherto without disclosures of interest to the archæologist. In two cases only, so far as I have been able to ascertain, did any trace of prior human presence appear. At the depth of nearly two feet from the surface, in front of the Parliament buildings, the bones and horn of a deer lay amid an accumulation of charcoal and wood ashes, and with them a rude stone chisel or hatchet. More recently, to the west of the same spot, at a depth of eight or nine feet, one of the cervical vertebræ of the Wapiti (_Cervus Canadensis_), was found along with a rude stone hatchet and a lance-head of flint. But the travelled fossils of the Toronto drift are of a very different era, and belong to the Hudson river group of the Lower Silurian, like the rocks on which it is superimposed. With varying organic remains imbedded in its clay and gravel, the same formation overlies the true fossiliferous rocks of Western Canada; and seems to make of its long stretch of wooded levels and gentle undulations a country fitted to slumber through untold centuries under the shadow of its forests, a type of the earth of primeval man, until the new-born mechanical science of Europe provided for it the railway and the locomotive, and made its vast chain of rivers and lakes a highway for the steamboat. With such novel facilities added to the indomitable energy of the intruding occupants, the whole face of the continent is in rapid process of transformation; and it is well, ere