ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES
Printed by R. & R. Clark
FOR
DAVID DOUGLAS, EDINBURGH
THE LOST ATLANTIS
AND OTHER
ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDIES
BY
Sir DANIEL WILSON, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
AUTHOR OF ‘THE PREHISTORIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND’
‘PREHISTORIC MAN: THE ORIGIN OF CIVILISATION,’ ETC. ETC.
NEW YORK
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1892
All rights reserved
PREFACE
“The Preface is the most troublesome part of a book,” I haveoften heard my dear Father say; and now it falls to myunaccustomed pen to write a preface for him.
I cannot undertake to define the aim of this book; I canonly tell how the last work on it was done. In my Father’snote-book I find it described as “A few carefully studied monographs,linked together by a slender thread of ethnographicrelationship.”
Returning in June last from a brief visit to Montreal, withthe first signs of illness beginning to show, he found a bundle ofproofs waiting for him, and with the characteristic promptnesswhich never let any duty wait, he set to work at once tocorrect them. “It is my last book,” he said, conscious thathis busy brain had nearly fulfilled all its tasks; and sothrough days of rapidly increasing weakness and pain he layon the sofa correcting proofs till the pen dropped from thehand no longer able to hold it. His mind turned to thebook in his wandering thoughts from illness, and on one ofthese occasions he murmured: “Sybil will write the Preface”;and so I try to fulfil his wish. “Ask Mr. Douglas to correctthe proofs himself, and to be sure to make an index,” was oneof his last requests, thus providing for the finishing of thework which he could not himself finish. He has passednow from this world whose prehistoric story he so lovinglytried to decipher, and where he was ever finding traces of thehand of God, into that other world, “where toil shall ceaseand rest begin”; but where I doubt not he still goes onlearning more and more, no longer seeing through a glass darklybut in perfect light.
The silent lips seem to speak once more in this volume—hislas