most to their liking. The marriage was concluded forthwith, with the help of a priest and a notary, and the next day the governor-general caused the couple to be presented with an ox, a cow, a pair of swine, a pair of fowls, two barrels of salted meat, and eleven crowns in money.'

.

"So far as regards the character of the girls, there can be little doubt that this amusing sketch is for the most part untrue. Since the colony began, it had been the practice to send back to France women of the class alluded to by La Hontan, as soon as they became notorious. .. Mistakes nevertheless occurred. Along with the honest people,' complains Mother Mary, comes a great deal of canaille of both sexes, who cause a great deal of scandal.' After some of the young women had been married at Quebec, it was found that they had husbands at home. priests became cautious in tying the matrimonial knot, and Colbert thereupon ordered that each girl should provide herself with a certificate from the curé or magistrate of her parish to the effect that she was free to marry. Nor was the practical intendant unmindful of other precautions to smooth the path to the desired goal. The girls destined for this country,' he writes, besides being strong and healthy, ought to be entirely free from any natural blemish or anything personally repulsive.'"..

The

These paternally united pairs were encouraged by rewards from the king to multiply the number of his subjects as rapidly as possible. Premiums were offered for early marriages, and for large families. One summer a shipment of young women takes place, and the next year the intendant writes home that nearly all are in a forward way to gratify the king's wishes; that year seven hundred children are born. The whole chapter devoted to marriage and population is very curious and amusing, and it is lamentable to know that after all the king's cares and pains the population only increased twenty-five thousand in fifty years. Many children died of the cruel climate and the hard life; of those

that grew up, vast numbers found the perfection of church and state intolerable, and escaping into the wilderness became coureurs de bois. But, the impulse once given, the habit of having large families still continues in Canada, where ten, twelve, or fifteen children from one marriage are common, while a meagre three or four constitute a family south of the border.

In his notices of that picturesque offshoot of the Canadian civilization, the coureur de bois, Mr. Parkman has given a picture of the wilderness which affects us like a vigorous sketch made by some quick-eyed, sure-handed painter in the presence of the scene; the desert breathes from it; the canvas has the very light and darkness of the primeval woods on it: "" Perhaps he could sometimes feel, without knowing that he felt them, the charms of the savage nature that had adopted him. Rude as he was, her voice may not always have been meaningless for one who knew her haunts so well: deep recesses where, veiled in foliage, some wild shy rivulet steals with timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags rise like castle walls, where the noonday sun pierces with keen rays athwart the torrent, and the mossed arms of fallen pines cast wavering shadows on the illumined foam; pools of liquid crystal turned emerald in the reflected green of impending woods; rocks on whose rugged front the gleam of sunlit waters dances in quivering light; ancient trees hurled headlong by the storm to dam the raging stream with their forlorn and savage ruin; or the stern depths of immemorial forests, dim and silent as a cavern, columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channeled rind; some strong in youth, some grisly with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks,

Mr. Parkman gives with the greatest fullness the particulars of that fond despotism which made life in the colony insufferable to all free and generous spirits. The government concerned itself with everything: when the marriages were made and the population produced under its patronage, it took absolute charge of the people. "If the population does not increase in proportion to the pains I take," writes the king to one of the intendants," you are to lay the blame on yourself for not having executed one of my principal orders," and the intendants acted up to the spirit of the king's orders. Early in the eighteenth century the intendant Randot conceived that the Montreal farmers were raising too many horses; he ordered them to raise more sheep and cattle, and to kill off the next year all beyond a certain number of horses. The intendant Bigot forbade farmers to remove to Quebec under pain of the confiscation of their goods, and he forbade the towns-people to let lodgings to them under pain of a hundred livres fine. The king, to prevent subdivision of farms, ordered that no buildings should be put up on lands of less than a certain extent, and that all buildings then standing on such lands should be torn down.

"The due subordination of households had its share of attention. Servants who deserted their masters were to be set in the pillory for the first offense, and whipped and branded for the second; while any person harboring them was to pay a fine of twenty francs. On the other hand, nobody was allowed to employ a servant without a license."

"Public meetings were jealously restricted. Even those held by parishioners under the eye of the curé, to estimate the cost of a new church, seem to have required a special license from the

intendant. During a number of years a meeting of the principal inhabitants of Quebec was called in spring and autumn by the council to discuss the price and quality of bread, the supply of fire-wood, and other similar matters. Such assemblies, so controlled, could scarcely, one would think, wound the tenderest susceptibilities of authority; yet there was evident distrust of them, and after a few years this modest shred of self-government is seen no more. The syndic, too, that functionary whom the people of the towns were at first allowed to choose, under the eye of the authorities, was conjured out of existence by a word from the king. Seignior, censitaire, and citizen were prostrate alike in flat subjection to the royal will. They were not free even to go home to France. No inhabitant of Canada, man or woman, could do so without leave; and several intendants express their belief that without this precaution there would soon be a falling off in the population."

If the government was annoying and vexatious in its interference with social and family life, it was calamitous in its patronage of trade. None of the enter prises which the king encouraged came to anything; the natural commerce of the colony in furs was made ruinous to the merchants by his meddling. A change in the fashion of hats reduced the demand for beaver; but the king had ordered that the monopolists of the furtrade should take every beaver - skin brought them at a certain price, and more than once the hapless merchants, to rid themselves of their unsalable stock, were obliged to burn hundreds of thousands of pounds of furs. At the same time the colony was flooded with worthless currency invented to prevent the return of money to France. The only trade that flourished was the brandy trade with the Indians, and this the Jesuits, the first prohibitionists on our continent, strove unceasingly to destroy. The king would perhaps have been glad to join hands with them in the work, but it was represented to the government that if the French did not sell the Indians brandy, these savage allies

would give their friendship to the Dutch and English, and would not even come near enough to be converted by the Jesuits. Besides, the traders were beyond the king's power, which they evaded or defied. Indeed, under this government, which possessed itself so perfectly of every fact of life that it knew as well as the neighborhood gossips when a wife was about to bless her husband with offspring, peculation and dishonesty of all sorts were rife. Nothing was impossible but decent privacy, free opinion, and independent industry.

We regret that we have not space for comment on the chapters relating to the feudal system in Canada, which we commend specially to the reader's notice. There is also a most delightful chapter on the morals and manners of the colonists, in which we find this sketch by the Swedish botanist Kalm, who visited Canada in the early half of the last century.

"The men here (at Montreal) are extremely civil, and take their hats off to every person indifferently whom they meet in the streets. The women in general are handsome; they are well bred and virtuous, with an innocent and becoming freedom. They dress out very fine on Sundays, and though on the other days they do not take much pains with the other parts of their dress, yet they are very fond of adorning their heads, the hair of which is always curled and powdered and ornamented with glittering bodkins and aigrettes. They are not averse to taking part in all the business of housekeeping. . . . Those of Quebec are not very industrious. The young ladies, especially those of a higher rank, get up at seven and dress till nine, drinking their coffee at the same time. When they are dressed they place themselves near a window that opens into the street, take up some needle-work, and sew a stitch now and then, but turn their eyes into the street most of the time. When a young fellow comes in, whether they are acquainted with him or not, they immediately lay aside their work, sit down by him, and begin to chat, laugh, joke, and invent double-entendres, and this is reckoned beVOL. XXXIV. - NO. 205.

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ing very witty. In this manner they frequently pass the whole day, leaving their mothers to do the business of the house. The girls at Montreal are very much displeased that those at Quebec get husbands sooner than they. The reason of this is that many young gentlemen who come over from France with the ships are captivated by the ladies at Quebec and marry them; but, as these gentlemen seldom go up to Montreal, the girls there are not often so happy as those of the former place."

The final chapter is mainly a comparison of the fortunes of Canada with those of the Puritan colonies to the south of her; and this is not, as one can easily believe, to the disadvantage of New England. It fitly closes a work which, freely as we have quoted from it, we have scarcely represented in the fullness with which it pictures the old colonial life of Canada. We may safely say that it leaves untouched no point of interest or significance in that life, and we must again praise the excellent taste of the whole work. If one will think with what good sense and discretion the rich material is managed, in a time when there has been so much meretricious historical writing, disfigured by the wretched egotisms of the writers, and falsified by their literary posturing and their disposition to color whole epochs from a single picturesque event, — in a time when, to say it briefly, Hepworth Dixon has descended directly, however illegitimately, from Thomas Carlyle, one will be the more grateful to the author who has given us this valuable and charming book. There is material enough in it for innumerable romances, for many volumes of historical sketching, eked out as such things are with plausible conjecture and conscious comment. Mr. Parkman one readily sees it- does not lack at any moment due sense of the strangeness of the situation he depicts; a lurking smile lights up the gravity of his narrative at times; and it all glows from an imagination which the sublime and poetic facts never fail to kindle. But he addresses himself with direct simplicity to the business of

making the reader understand him and discern the characters and events; this accomplished, he leaves the story to the possession of the delighted fancy.

Mr. Parkman has been most fortunate, of course, in his subject. The period which he presents lies comparatively near at hand; its outlines are distinctly marked; its characteristic traits are broad and clear. If his researches have not exhausted the whole material, they have explored everything that was attainable in Canada and France, and they have developed so much fact that the reader may feel full security that nothing essential is lacking. It seems to us that it must be the last word on the subject-except, of course, from those Catholic critics who will disagree with Mr. Parkman's opinions and inferences, and from whom he will probably not soon hear the last word. But here we comfort ourselves in a world which is continually rebuilding - seems really to be work that need not be done over again.

We have this feeling in regard to Mr. Parkman's other histories. He would probably be the last to allow that his efforts had left nothing for future workers in the same field to do; but we believe that whatever may be added to his labors, they will remain undisturbed as thorough, beautiful, and true. He has, no doubt, worked from a purpose inspired by the charm of his theme, and sustained under manifold discouragements and fatigues by a sense of its importance-an importance to us whose race has inherited Canada, and whose polity has shaped its present national existence, far surpassing that of the Spanish American conquests. The story of these conquests will always fascinate us, but their interest is a vulgar one compared with that of the story of the French dominion in North America. Here is no tale of lawless and cruel adventure, but the annals of an attempt so grand and generous that its most comical and most ruinous consequences are never less than heroic. Setting aside such vague episodes as that of the Huguenots in Florida, and beginning

with Champlain at Quebec, in 1606, — or with Jacques Cartier nearly a century earlier, — we have an unbroken chain of magnificent errors in colonization, illustrated by every virtue, except tolerance and forbearance, that can ennoble success. The history of the Jesuit martyrdoms and sacrifices, as Mr. Parkman tells it, abounds in testimony to their unselfish and saintly zeal in the attempt to found in the New World a church which should be the state of the whole red race religiously civilized under them. The history of Louis XIV.'s persistent purpose to plant in the frozen wilderness a regenerate monarchical France, free from the seeds of heresy or independent political life, is the record of an ambition almost unexampled in sincere benevolence. The priest was not more determined or well-meaning than the king; it is hard to say which was the more disastrously mistaken, or which did more to prepare the colony, on which so much blood and treasure had been lavished, for conquest by the enemies of both. The time came, with Wolfe, when France was almost glad to be rid of her helpless offspring; but meanwhile there was a long interval, in which such achievements as La Salle's Discovery of the Great West added to the glory of the French name, and of which Mr. Parkman promises the full narrative. The time came after Wolfe, when the French power, which could alone have preserved the native tribes on the continent, forsook them, and left them to make under their chief Pontiac a last general stand against the English; left them to be driven from place to place, to be trodden out, to linger at this day a feeble and vicious remnant on the Western plains, the scourge of the settlers, the prey of the Indian rings.

If we have objected to nothing in these histories, it is because we have no fault to find with them. They appear to us the fruit of an altogether admirable motive directing indefatigable industry, and they present the evidences of thorough research and thoughtful philosophization. philosophization. We find their style delightful always.

W. D. Howells.

THE visitor who has passed through the halls of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, and surveyed with astonishment those vast collections brought together and built up under the eye of the great master whom the Old World bred and educated for us and lent us, may perhaps be reminded that there is another collection not far distant which it will be worth his while to visit. He has just seen what can be done by a man of extraordinary genius, trained by the most distinguished teachers of Europe, aided by large private munificence and public appropriations, and assisted by a numerous corps of skilful and enthusiastic fellow - workers. The result, fragment as it yet is of a colossal plan, is worthy of the man and the agencies which by the force of his will, the influence of his example, the renown of his

name,

the seductions of his eloquence, the charms of his companionship, and above all the devotion of his life, he obtained the mastery of, and wielded for his one grand purpose, that of building up a museum such as the country of his adoption might be proud to show the land of his birth and the world of science. After what the visitor has just passed in review, the grand achievement of so many co-laborers under such guidance, it may seem like asking too much to call on him again for his admiration in showing him another collection, not wholly unlike the last in many of its features, the work almost entirely of a single hand.

We enter the modest edifice known as Boylston Hall, and going up a flight of stairs find a door at the right, through which we pass into a hall extending the whole depth of the building. The tables in the centre of the floor, the cases surrounding the apartment, and the similar cases in the gallery over these, are chiefly devoted to compara

tive anatomy. Above the first gallery is a second, devoted to the archæological and ethnological objects which make up the Peabody Museum.

The fine effect of the hall and its arrangements will at once strike the observer. In the centre of the floor stands the huge skeleton of a mastodon found in Warren County, New Jersey, in 1844. Full-sized casts of the "fighting gladiator," as it was formerly called, and the Venus of Milo stand at the two extremities of the hall, and one of the Venus de Medici opposite the door. Stretched out at length in glass cases are the anatomical wax figures, male and female, which used of old to be so wondered over by the awe-struck visitors who had gained admission into little Holden Chapel. The skeletons of a large alligator, and of an overgrown ant-eater; a rattlesnake of fearful size and aspect, and a youthful saw-fish, both in alcohol; a slab with fossil foot-prints from the Connecticut River valley, and cases of separate bones from the four animal kingdoms, are the other principal objects grouped about the mastodon.

In the cases around the room are great numbers of fine skeletons, of man and of various animals, among them of the jaguar, the ostrich, the boa-constrictor, and of immense sea-turtles. Most interesting of all are the skull and other bones of a mighty gorilla. His head and pelvis are far from human in their aspect, but his arm-bone is so like that of his cousin Darwinian, that it looks as if it might have belonged to Goliath of Gath, or Og, king of Bashan. The skeleton of a young chimpanzee, by the side of that of a child, has a strongly marked effect of similar significance. There are also whole series of special preparations to show the parts of the skeleton concerned in locomotion in different classes of animals.