have been repeatedly
warned by outsiders that no public men would ever listen to anything
which could not be expressed in "easy terms of dollars and cents!" And
I do so in full confidence that no appeal to the intellectual life
would fall on deaf ears among the members of a Commission which was
founded to lead rather than follow the best thought of our time. I
need not remind you that from the topmost heights of Evolution you can
see whole realms of Nature infinitely surpassing all those of
business, sport and tourist recreation, and that the theory of
Evolution itself is the crowned brain of the entire Animal Kingdom.
But I doubt whether, as yet, we fully realize that Labrador is
absolutely unique in being the only stage on which the prologue and
living pageant of Evolution can be seen together from a single
panoramic point of view. The sea and sky are everywhere the same
primeval elements. But no other country has so much primeval land to
match them. Labrador is a miracle of youth and age combined. It is
still growing out of the depths with the irresistible vigour of youth.
But its titanic tablelands consist of those azoic rocks which form the
very roots of all the other mountains in the world, and which are so
old, so immeasurably older than any others now standing on the surface
of the globe, that their Laurentians alone have the real right to bear
the title of "The Everlasting Hills". Being azoic these Laurentians
are older than the first age when our remotest ancestors appeared in
the earliest of animal forms, millions and millions of years ago.
They are, in fact, the only part of the visible Earth which was
present when Life itself was born. So here are the three great
elemental characters, all together--the primal sea and sky and
land--to act the azoic prologue. And here, too, for all mankind to
glory in, is the whole pageant of animal life: from the weakest
invertebrate forms, which link us with the illimitable past, to the
mightiest developments of birds and mammals at the present day, the
leviathan whales around us, the soaring eagles overhead, and man
himself--the culmination of them all--and especially migrating man,
whose incoming myriads are linking us already with the most pregnant
phases of the future. Where else are there so many intimate appeals
both to the child and the philosopher? Where else, in all this world,
are there any parts of the Creation more fit to exalt our visions and
make us "Look, th