Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/146

taken. We can gather from these figures some idea of the mode of life of the Acadians of those days. Their cattle and sheep were their main resource, and the wealth of each individual can be measured by the number of his live stock. Tried by this test the rich men of the settlement at Port Royal were Jacob Bourgeois, Antoine Hébert, François Gauterat, Claude Petitpas, Jean Labathe, François Bourc, François Girouard, Pierre Vincent, Daniel Lebland, Antoine Gougeon, Pierre Commeaux, Abraham Dugast, Michel Richard, and Charles Melanson. The last named had 40 head of cattle and cultivated 20 arpents of land. Only one man in the Port Royal settlements cultivated more land than Melanson. This was Claude Petitpas, who tilled 30 arpents, but had fewer cattle.

There is one peculiarity about this census which seems to have escaped the notice of M. Rameau and others who have quoted it, the fact that the names of a large number of persons, thirty-six in all, are given twice. Take for instance the family of Jean Terriau, which is given in the census as numbering nine persons, including the father and mother, five sons and two daughters. As a matter of fact there were only four persons in the family at home, for both the daughters and three of the sons, Claude, Bonaventure and Germain, were married and had homes of their own. The failure to note this fact has caused M. Rameau and others to give the population of the Port Royal settlement as 361 when it was in reality 36 less, owing to the duplication of names. The matter is not of very great consequence, except for the purpose of showing the extremely cursory fashion in which this census has been dealt with, so that the way seems to be open for a more careful analysis of it than it has yet received.

It is very much to be regretted that Laurent Molin, the grey friar who took the census, did not