improvement still survive, and the ingenious models of such craft which were exhibited at the Fisheries Exhibition in London a few years ago will haye been noticed by many of our readers. ‘Twin vessels like the ‘ Castalia,’ and, if we are to believe the learned Graser, the great Tesseraconteres of Ptelemy, had their primitive germ, so to speak, in this early stroke of genius. It may appear strange to some boating men who are accus- tomed to hear a good deal about outriggers, that this outrigger of which we have been speaking has nothing to do with the outrigger with which they are familiar. It never apparently passed into the Western Seas. The Mediterranean knows it not. The Andaman Islands and the Seychelles are its western- most limits.
But if the invention of the dug-out canoe was a step onward in the general progress of the arts, being the appreciation and application of a principle in nature, a still greater triumph was achieyed, and the particular art still more decidedly advanced, by him who first constructed the canoe properly so called. Herein was the real prototype of the species boat. A skin of bark, duly cut and shaped so as to taper towards the ends and be wide amidships, was attached to a longitudinal framework or gun- wale all along its upper edges, and this itself was kept apart and in shape by three or more transverse pieces stretching from side to side, while a series of curved laths of soft wood, the extreme ends of which also fastened to the gunwale, served to keep the vessel itself in shape and to protect the bark skin from the tread of menand from the immediate incidence of any weight to be carried. ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui cofte.’ The idea once conceived, whether in one place or in many, and at whatever time or times, could not be lost and must soon have been fruitful in development. Of this class by far the most common is the birch-bark canoc, which, though found also in Australia, is properly regarded as having its home upon the American continent. If not the original of the type, yet it deserves particular attention owing to the peculiarity of the material of the skin, which combines lightness and toughness and
