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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #51881.
The work is a scholarly miscellany assembled by Daniel Wilson Sir after his death in 1892, presented as his final contribution to ethnology. It opens with a personal dedication from his sister Sybil, who explains how Wilson, weakened by illness, laboured over proofs in Montreal before his passing, and how she has fulfilled his wishes to see the volume published. The table of contents then outlines eight extensive essays, ranging from a reinterpretation of the Atlantis legend to studies of North‑American indigenous peoples, stone‑age trade, racial heredity, and the Huron‑Iroquois. The introductory chapter on “The Lost Atlantis” situates the myth within classical sources, nineteenth‑century scholarship, and contemporary geological debate, offering a measured critique of speculative theories while tracing the legend’s transmission from Plato through later writers.
Written in the formal, erudite prose of the late Victorian era, the book reflects the period’s blend of antiquarian curiosity and emerging scientific rigor. Its tone is that of a learned gentleman‑scholar, dense with citations and rhetorical flourishes, appealing to readers who enjoy historic‑anthropological discourse, the intellectual history of myth, and the early development of comparative ethnology. Those with an interest in the 19th‑century debate over Atlantis, or in the nascent study of Native American antiquities, will find Wilson’s meticulous arguments and extensive references rewarding.
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Returning in June last from a brief visit to Montreal, with the first signs of illness beginning to show, he found a bundle of proofs waiting for him, and with the characteristic promptness which never let any duty wait, he set to work at once to correct them. “It is my last book,” he said, conscious that his busy brain had nearly fulfilled all its tasks; and so through days of rapidly increasing weakness and pain he lay on the sofa correcting proofs till the pen dropped from the hand no longer able to hold it. His mind turned to the book in his wandering thoughts from illness, and on one of these occasions he murmured: “Sybil will write the Preface”; and so I try to fulfil his wish. “Ask Mr. Douglas to correct the proofs himself, and to be sure to make an index,” was one of his last requests, thus providing for the finishing of the work which he could not himself finish. He has passed now from this world whose prehistoric story he so lovingly tried to decipher, and where he was ever finding traces of the hand of God, into that other world, “where toil shall cease and rest begin”; but where I doubt not he still goes on learning more and more, no longer seeing through a glass darkly but in perfect light.
The silent lips seem to speak once more in this volume—his last words to the public; and I commit it very tenderly to those who are interested in his favourite study of Ethnology.
SYBIL WILSON. BENCOSIE, TORONTO, August 1892.
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