It is not without interest to note in conclusion that the main body of the representatives of the nations of the ancient Iroquois league sprung from the Huron-Iroquois stock of Eastern Canada,—after sojourning for centuries beyond the St. Lawrence, until the traditions of the home of the race had faded out of memory, or given place to mythic legends of autochthon origin,—has returned to Canadian soil. At Caughnawaga, St. Regis, Oka, and on the river St. Charles, in the Province of Quebec; at Anderdon, the Bay of Quinté, and above all, on the Grand river, in Ontario; the Huron-Iroquois are now settled to the number of upwards of 8000, without reckoning other tribes. If, indeed, the surviving representatives of the aborigines in the old provinces of the Canadian Dominion are taken as a whole, they number upwards of 34,000, apart from the many thousands in Manitoba, British Columbia, and the North-west Territories. But the nomad Indians must be classed wholly apart from the settlers on the Grand river reserves. The latter are a highly intelligent, civilised people, more and more adapting themselves to the habits of the strangers who have supplanted them; and they are destined as certainly to merge into the predominant race, as the waters of their ancient lakes mingle and are lost in the ocean. Yet the process is no longer one of extinction but of absorption; and will assuredly leave traces of the American autochthones, similar to those which still in Europe perpetuate some ethnical memorial of Allophylian races. ----- [111] _Types of Mankind_, p. 291. [112] _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 43. [113] _The Indian Races of North and South America_, p. 286. [114] _Magazine of American History_, vol. x. p. 479. [115] _Archæologia Americana_, vol. ii. p. 173. [116] _Indian Migrations_, p. 17. [117] _Whitney’s Study of Language_, p. 348. [118] _The Tutelo Tribe and Language_, p. 9. [119] _Relation_, 1641, p. 72. [120] _Peter Jones and the Ojibway Indians_, p. 31. [121] _The Life and Growth of Languages_, p. 259. [122] Hale’s _Indian Migrations as evidenced by Language_, p. 3. [123] _Anthropology_, by Dr. Paul Topinard: Eng. Trans., p. 480. [124] “The Huron Race and Head-form:” N. S. _Canadian Journal_, vol. xiii. p. 113. [125] _Crania Americana_, p. 195. [126] _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 47. [127] _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, p. 78. [128] _Ibid._, pp. 21, 22. [129] _League of the Iroquois_, p. 4. [130] _Notes on the Iroquois_, p. 51. [131] _Lectures on the Science of Language_, 5th ed. p. 58. [132] _Notes on the Iroquois_, p. 52. [133] _Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts_, p. 4. [134] _Pioneers of France in the New World_, p. 367. [135] _League of the Iroquois_, p. 76. [136] _The Jesuits in North America_, p. 441 note. [137] _History of the Indian Tribes_, vol. ii. p. 78. [138] “Huron Race and Head-form,” _Canadian Journal_, N. S., vol. xiii. p. 113.