ilst in office, by rendering his measures
mere jobs.

This has been amended under Lord Metcalfe's administration; and it is to
be hoped that the office of President of the Board of Works will
hereafter be one subjected to severe but not to vexatious scrutiny, and
at the same time carefully guarded against political influence, and only
rendered tenable with honour by the capacity of the person selected to
fill it and of his subordinates. Canada is, as I have written two former
volumes to prove, a magnificent country. I doubt very much if Nature has
created a finer country on the whole earth.

The soil is generally good, as that made by the decay of forests for
thousands of years upon substrata, chiefly formed of alluvion or
diluvion, the deposit from waters, must be. It is, moreover, from Quebec
to the Falls of St. Mary, almost a flat surface, intersected and
interlaced by numberless streams, and studded with small lakes, whilst
its littorale is a river unparalleled in the world, expanding into
enormous fresh water seas, abounding with fish.

If the tropical luxuries are absent, if its winters are long and
excessively severe, yet it yields all the European fruits abundantly,
and even some of the tropical ones, owing to the richness of its soil
and the great heat of the summer. Maize, or Indian corn, flourishes, and
is more wholesome and better than that produced in the warm South. The
crops of potato, that apple of the earth, as the French so justly term
it, are equal, if not superior, to those of any other climate; whilst
all the vegetables of the temperate regions of the old world grow with
greater luxuriance than in their original fields. I have successively
and successfully cultivated the tomato, the melon, and the capsicum, in
the open air, for several seasons, at Kingston and Toronto, which are
not the richest or the best parts of Western Canada, as far as
vegetation is concerned. Tobacco grows well in the western district, and
where is finer wheat harvested than in Western Canada?--whilst hay, and
that beauty of a landscape, the rich green sod, the velvet carpet of the
earth, are abundant and luxuriant.

If the majesty of vegetation is called in question, and intertropical
plants brought forward in contrast, even the woods and trackless
forests of Guiana, where the rankest of luxuriance prevails, will not do
more than compete with the glory of the primeval woods of Canada. I know
of nothing in this world capab