Among what may be accepted as typical Canadian skulls, those recovered from the old site of Hochelaga, and from the Huron ossuaries around Lake Simcoe, have a special value. They represent the native race which, under various names, extended from the Lower St. Lawrence westward to Lake St. Clair. The people encountered by Cartier and the first French explorers of 1535, and those whom Champlain found settled around the Georgian Bay sixty-eight years later, appear to have been of the same stock. Such primitive local names, as Stadaconé and Hochelaga, are not Algonkin, but Huron-Iroquois. Native traditions, as well as the allusions of the earliest French writers, confirm this idea of the occupation by a Huron-Iroquois or Wyandot population of the “region north-eastward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, at or somewhere along the Gulf coast, before they ever met with the French, or any European adventurers,” as reaffirmed in the narrative of their own native historian, Peter Dooyentate.[133] But whatever confirmation may be found for this native tradition, it is certain that the European adventurers bore no part in their expulsion from their ancient home. The aborigines, whom Jacques Cartier found a prosperous people, safe in the shelter of their palisaded towns, had all vanished before the return of the French under Champlain; and they were found by him in new settlements, which they had formed far to the westward on Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay. Questions of considerable interest are involved in the consideration of this migration of the Hurons; and the circumstances under which they deserted their earlier home. They were visited by Champlain in 1615, and subsequently by the missionary Fathers, who, in 1639, found them occupying thirty-two palisaded villages, fortified in the same fashion as those described by the first French explorers at Stadaconé and Hochelaga. Their numbers are variously estimated. Brebeuf reckoned them at 30,000; and described them as living together in towns sometimes of fifty, sixty, or a hundred dwellings,—that is, of three or four hundred householders,—and diligently cultivating their fields, from which they derived food for the whole year. Whatever higher qualities distinguished the Iroquois from Algonkin or other native races, were fully shared in by the Hurons; and they are even spoken of with a natural partiality by their French allies, like Sagard, as a patrician order of savages, in comparison with those of the Five Nations. When first visited by French explorers, after their protracted journey through the desolate forests between the Ottawa and Lake Huron, their palisaded towns and cultivated fields must have seemed like an oasis in the desert. “To the eye of Champlain,” says Mr. Parkman, “accustomed to the desolation he had left behind, it seemed a land of beauty and abundance. There was a broad opening in the forest, fields of maize with pumpkins ripening in the