work of art? In the paper which I read before the New Brunswick Society I was unable to give any tolerably satisfactory reply to this. At the present time I think that I can suggest an answer which may be correct, and which, at least, deserves some consideration. The members of that society were, if I mistake not, generally impressed with the force of the arguments brought forward to support the suggestion that the sculptor was an Indian, and were inclined to guess that the carving was, in some indefinite way, connected with the funeral rites, or was in commemoration of a departed brave. No work published at that time afforded any solution of the difficulty. No relics of a similar character to this had been dug up at any Indian burial ground in New Brunswick, and although our Indians produce very well executed full relief figures of the beaver, the muskrat, and the otter, upon soapstone pipes, their skill apparently goes no further in this direction. I have indeed seen rude sketches of human figures executed by these people, but have never seen or been informed of any likeness to a man being carved by them in stone. It was only by bringing pieces of information together, and after the lapse of some years, that I was enabled to suggest an answer to an apparently almost unanswerable question. Upon one occasion, while in conversation with an old resident of St. George, he gave me an account of a somewhat singular monument which, many years before this period, stood on the summit of a high hill near the canal, and about one-half mile distant from the place where the carved stone was found. It consisted of a large oval or rounded stone, weighing, as my informant roughly estimates, seventy five hundred weight, lying on three vertical stone columns, from ten inches to one foot in height, and firmly sunk in the ground thus . • . (The above weight, I should imagine, is an over-estimate, but I give it as stated to me.) The site of this monument is marked b on the preceding map. My informant stated that the boys and other visitors were in the habit of throwing stones at the columns, and that eventually the monument was tumbled over, by the combined effort of a number of ship carpenters, and fell crashing into the valley. Some years afterwards I read, for the first time, Francis Parkman's "Pioneers of France in the New World," when my attention was at once arrested, and the conversation with the gentleman from St. George brought to my mind, by a passage which occurs on page 349, of that highly interesting work.
Champlain, the writer states, had journeyed up the Ottawa River beyond Lake Ooulange, and had reached an island in the neighborhood of the village of a chief named Tessonat, which, Mr. Parkman is of opinion, was on the Lower Lake des Allumettes. I quote what the historian writes of what the French explorer sees: "Here, too, was a cemetery, which excited the wonder of Champlain, for the dead were better cared for than the living. Over each grave a flat tablet of wood was supported on posts, and at one end stood an upright tablet, carved with an intended representation of the features of the deceased."
