NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA.
British Columbia has been evolved. It is, in other words, that huge tract of mountainous country lying between the coast range and the Rocky Mountains, from 51 deg. 30 min. to 57 deg. of north latitude, and in which "endless forests, mostly of coniferous trees, and deep lakes, whose length generally exceeds their breadth, cover such spaces as are not taken up by moun- tains." The region was, until the Hudson's Bay Company came on the scene in the end of the eighteenth century, left in the Lands of Indian aborigines, whose habits and mode of life are fully described by Mr. Merle°. Its discoverer was Alexander Mackenzie, a Scotch Highlander born at Stornoway, who came to Montreal about 1779. "of a restless and somewhat impetuous disposition, he was by nature inclined to be biassed, and if crossed in his plans he would become rather self-assertive and stubborn." Mackenzie, however, succeeded in his enter- prise, and the bulk of the book is concerned with the govern- ment of the territory by the Company through its adminis- trators, several of whom were men of great ability. That administration was not, however, perfect in every detail. As late as 1848 Dr. Manson, the gentleman then in charge of the district, speaks of a keg of rum which was regularly kept for the use of a tribe of Indians, and long after that date intoxicants figured regularly in the Company's transactions with the natives. Again, one is almost horrified to learn that "to punish a misdeed 1,)y untutored savages, white men who should have known better turned themselves into savages and paid back tooth (or rather teeth) for tooth, the innocent sometimes sharing the fate of the guilty. Arrest and trial as a consequence of a fault were something utterly unknown among the lords of the lonely North.
The results on the native mind were disastrous ; that system simply confirmed the Indians in the propriety of their hereditary feuds and the rightfulness of their unending reprisals." The book is full of interesting anecdotes of the Indian tribes, and is admirably written.
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