Pour une esquisse biogéographique du Saint-Laurent

In most instances, biogeographical monographs deal only with a fragmentary aspect of the subject-matter. In spite of their titles, some of these monographs are nothing but phytogeographical essays, and even then, these deal with a limited range of phanerogams only and leave aside the cryptogams. This is so because the authors, when they are not also systematically oriented, neglect a large segment of the flora and fauna. Research conditions also require sometimes specialization around one particular point. A biogeographical study which would claim to be comprehensive must include not only the vegetation cover, the fauna, and man in his many-sided activities, but also a description of the whole living world since the very beginnings of the organization of the Biosphere.Taking the Saint-Lawrence River, this essay depicts some examples of features which are all-important in an unabridged biogeography. Thus, the study deals successively with the pageant of life on the River since the Precambrian era ; a brief look at the discordant levels of the Laurentian flora : the upper part of the thalweg, the banks, the shores, and the waters, since each of these elements follow a different evolution in their rhythm; the calendar of the seasons and the irregularities which upset the climatic cycle. Finally, man enters the scène with all the elements which tie him to the River: patterns of settlement, toponymy, house construction styles, clothing, transportation, gathering, hunting, forestry and agriculture, gastronomy, medicine, and, finally, the role of the River in recreational activities and in literary works.Since the author bas devoted nearly half a century to the study of the River, this essay sometimes includes autobiographical elements

La forêt mixte du Québec dans la perspective historique

The mixed forest of the St. Lawrence valley, which presents jour successive landscapes during its seasonal rhythm, bas been the dorsal spine of Eastern Canada s economy since the establishment of the French colony.The various people who have successively inhabited this forest have either used it as members of the bio-sociological unit or tried to modify its ecology, depending on their traditional culture. It was occupied soon after the glacier recession by the Red-ochre Man, who was followed by the Algonkian forest hunters. Later, the same territory was inhabited by Iroquoian tribes, who brought with them their agriculture which had evolved in the South, but was reoccupied by the Algonkian tribes just before the foundation of Québec. At this time it became a country of European settlers, who carried with them their Old World agriculture and tried to reconstruct in a new continent their Normandie or Poitou landscape. For a newly established agriculturist, the land hardly produced enough for a living. The exploitation of Canadian forests was unpopular amongst the LaRochelle merchants who preferred to trade in the Baltic regions. The first important economic resource was the fur trade. Later, when Napoleon Bonaparte set up a blockade in the Baltic sea, England had to look elsewhere to save and develop her navy and found in the forests of Eastern Canada the pine-trees she needed. Finally, the increase in the number of news-papers, which was largely a consequence of the French revolution, developed another type of forest industry, the production of spruce pulp