We are not indeed to suppose that the Hurons employed the term Toronto as a proper name. We know that the aborigines used for the most part no proper names of places, in our sense of the word, their local appellations being simply brief descriptions or allusion to incidents. But we are to suppose that the early white men took notice of the vocable Toronto, frequently and emphatically uttered by their red companions, when pointing towards the Lake Simcoe region, or when pressing on in canoe or on foot, to reach it. Accordingly, at length, the vocable Toronto is caught up by the white voyageurs, and adopted as a local proper name in the European sense: just as had been the case already with the word Canada. ("Kanata" was a word continually heard on the lips of the red men in the Lower St. Lawrence, as they pointed to the shore; they simply meant to indicate--"Yonder are our wigwams;" but the French mariners and others took the expression to be a geographical name for the new region which they were penetrating. And such it has become.) We can now also see how it came to pass that the term Toronto was attached to a particular spot on the shore of Lake Ontario. The mouth of the Humber, or rather a point on the eastern side of the indentation known as Humber Bay, was the landing place of hunting parties, trading parties, war-parties, on their way to the populous region in the vicinity of Lake Simcoe. Here they disembarked for the tramp to Toronto. This was a Toronto landing-place for wayfarers bound to the district in the interior where there were crowds. And gradually the starting-place took the name of the goal. The style and title of the terminus _ad quem_ were usurped by the terminus _à quo_. Thus likewise it happened that the stockaded trading-post established near the landing on the indentation of Humber Bay came to be popularly known as Fort Toronto, although its actual, official name was Fort Rouillé. In regard to the signification which by some writers has been assigned to the word Toronto, of "trees rising out of the water"--we think the interpretation has arisen from a misunderstanding of language used by Indian canoe-men. Indian canoe-men in coasting along the shore of Lake Ontario from the east or west, would, we may conceive, naturally point to "the trees rising out of the water," the pines and black poplars looming up from the Toronto island or peninsula, as a familiar land-mark by which they knew the spot where they were to disembark for the "populous region to the north." The white men mixing together in their heads the description of the landmark and the district where, as they were, emphatically told, there were crowds, made out of the expressions "trees rising out of the water," and "Toronto," convertible terms, which they were not.