r there is a beach fifteen
hundred feet above the ocean. Probably in this period after the Ice Age
the shores of Eastern Canada had sunk so low that the St Lawrence was
not a river at all, but a great gulf or arm of the sea. The ancient
shore can still be traced beside the mountain at Montreal and on the
hillsides round Lake Ontario. Later on again the land rose, the ocean
retreated, and the rushing waters from the shrunken lakes made their
own path to the sea. In their foaming course to the lower level they
tore out the great gorge of Niagara, and tossed and buffeted themselves
over the unyielding ledges of Lachine.

Mighty forces such as these made and fashioned the continent on which
we live.

CHAPTER II

MAN IN AMERICA

It was necessary to form some idea, if only in outline, of the
magnitude and extent of the great geological changes of which we have
just spoken, in order to judge properly the question of the antiquity
and origin of man in America.

When the Europeans came to this continent at the end of the fifteenth
century they found it already inhabited by races of men very different
from themselves. These people, whom they took to calling 'Indians,'
were spread out, though very thinly, from one end of the continent to
the other. Who were these nations, and how was their presence to be
accounted for?

To the first discoverers of America, or rather to the discoverers of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Columbus and his successors),
the origin of the Indians presented no difficulty. To them America was
supposed to be simply an outlying part of Eastern Asia, which had been
known by repute and by tradition for centuries past. Finding,
therefore, the tropical islands of the Caribbean sea with a climate and
plants and animals such as they imagined those of Asia and the Indian
ocean to be, and inhabited by men of dusky colour and strange speech,
they naturally thought the place to be part of Asia, or the Indies. The
name 'Indians,' given to the aborigines of North America, records for
us this historical misunderstanding.

But a new view became necessary after Balboa had crossed the isthmus of
Panama and looked out upon the endless waters of the Pacific, and after
Magellan and his Spanish comrades had sailed round the foot of the
continent, and then pressed on across the Pacific to the real Indies.
It was now clear that America was a different region from Asia. Even
then the old error died hard. Long