quite sure of such travel in the near future; that is, of course, if the travellers have a land of life, not death, to come to.  And an excellent thing about it is that Labrador cannot be overrun and spoilt like what our American friends so aptly call a “pocket wilderness”.  Ten wild Englands, properly conserved, cannot be brought into the catalogue of common things quite so easily as all that!  Besides, Labrador enjoys a double advantage in being essentially a seaboard country.  The visitor has the advantage of being able to see a great deal of it—­and the finest parts, too—­without getting out of touch with his moveable base afloat.  And the country itself has the corresponding advantage of being less liable to be turned into a commonplace summer resort by the whole monotonizing apparatus of hotels and boarding houses and conventional “sights”.

And now, Sir, I venture once more to mention the higher interests, and actually to specify one of them, although I 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