Washington, D.C.
Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and referred to as Washington or D. C. is the capital of the United States. Founded after the American Revolution as the seat of government of the newly independent country, Washington was named after George Washington, first President of the United States and Founding Father; as the seat of the United States federal government and several international organizations, Washington is an important world political capital. The city is one of the most visited cities in the world, with more than 20 million tourists annually; the signing of the Residence Act on July 16, 1790, approved the creation of a capital district located along the Potomac River on the country's East Coast. The U. S. Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U. S. Congress, the District is therefore not a part of any state; the states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, which included the pre-existing settlements of Georgetown and Alexandria.
The City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia. Washington had an estimated population of 702,455 as of July 2018, making it the 20th most populous city in the United States. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's daytime population to more than one million during the workweek. Washington's metropolitan area, the country's sixth largest, had a 2017 estimated population of 6.2 million residents. All three branches of the U. S. federal government are centered in the District: Congress and the U. S. Supreme Court. Washington is home to many national monuments, museums situated on or around the National Mall; the city hosts 177 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of many international organizations, trade unions, non-profit, lobbying groups, professional associations, including the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States, AARP, the National Geographic Society, the Human Rights Campaign, the International Finance Corporation, the American Red Cross.
A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973. However, Congress may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, but the District has no representation in the Senate. The District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century. One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. In his Federalist No. 43, published January 23, 1788, James Madison argued that the new federal government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance and safety.
Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia. Known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution permits the establishment of a "District as may, by cession of particular states, the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States". However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital. In what is now known as the Compromise of 1790, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson came to an agreement that the federal government would pay each state's remaining Revolutionary War debts in exchange for establishing the new national capital in the southern United States. On July 9, 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River; the exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, who signed the bill into law on July 16.
Formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory: the port of Georgetown, founded in 1751, the city of Alexandria, founded in 1749. During 1791–92, Andrew Ellicott and several assistants, including a free African American astronomer named Benjamin Banneker, surveyed the borders of the federal district and placed boundary stones at every mile point. Many of the stones are still standing. A new federal city was constructed on the north bank of the Potomac, to the east of Georgetown. On September 9, 1791, the three commissioners overseeing the capital's construction named the city in honor of President Washington; the federal district was named Columbia, a poetic name for the United States in use at that time. Congress held its first session in Washington on November 17, 1800. Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 that organized the District and placed the entire territory under the exclusive control of the federal
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes that are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Different characteristics tend to exist within any given population as a result of mutation, genetic recombination and other sources of genetic variation. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or rare within a population, it is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms and molecules. The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century and was set out in detail in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. Evolution by natural selection was first demonstrated by the observation that more offspring are produced than can survive.
This is followed by three observable facts about living organisms: 1) traits vary among individuals with respect to their morphology and behaviour, 2) different traits confer different rates of survival and reproduction and 3) traits can be passed from generation to generation. Thus, in successive generations members of a population are more to be replaced by the progenies of parents with favourable characteristics that have enabled them to survive and reproduce in their respective environments. In the early 20th century, other competing ideas of evolution such as mutationism and orthogenesis were refuted as the modern synthesis reconciled Darwinian evolution with classical genetics, which established adaptive evolution as being caused by natural selection acting on Mendelian genetic variation. All life on Earth shares a last universal common ancestor that lived 3.5–3.8 billion years ago. The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite, to microbial mat fossils, to fossilised multicellular organisms.
Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped by repeated formations of new species, changes within species and loss of species throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Morphological and biochemical traits are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, can be used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees. Evolutionary biologists have continued to study various aspects of evolution by forming and testing hypotheses as well as constructing theories based on evidence from the field or laboratory and on data generated by the methods of mathematical and theoretical biology, their discoveries have influenced not just the development of biology but numerous other scientific and industrial fields, including agriculture and computer science. The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander and Empedocles; such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura.
In contrast to these materialistic views, Aristotelianism considered all natural things as actualisations of fixed natural possibilities, known as forms. This was part of a medieval teleological understanding of nature in which all things have an intended role to play in a divine cosmic order. Variations of this idea became the standard understanding of the Middle Ages and were integrated into Christian learning, but Aristotle did not demand that real types of organisms always correspond one-for-one with exact metaphysical forms and gave examples of how new types of living things could come to be. In the 17th century, the new method of modern science rejected the Aristotelian approach, it sought explanations of natural phenomena in terms of physical laws that were the same for all visible things and that did not require the existence of any fixed natural categories or divine cosmic order. However, this new approach was slow to take root in the biological sciences, the last bastion of the concept of fixed natural types.
John Ray applied one of the more general terms for fixed natural types, "species," to plant and animal types, but he identified each type of living thing as a species and proposed that each species could be defined by the features that perpetuated themselves generation after generation. The biological classification introduced by Carl Linnaeus in 1735 explicitly recognised the hierarchical nature of species relationships, but still viewed species as fixed according to a divine plan. Other naturalists of this time speculated on the evolutionary change of species over time according to natural laws. In 1751, Pierre Louis Maupertuis wrote of natural modifications occurring during reproduction and accumulating over many generations to produce new species. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon suggested that species could degenerate into different organisms, Erasmus Darwin proposed that all warm-blooded animals could have descended from a single microorganism; the first full-fledged evolutionary scheme was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's "transmutation" theory of 1809, which envisaged spontaneous generation continually producing simple forms of life that developed greater complexity in parallel lineages with an inherent progressive tendency, postulated that on a local level, these lineages adapted to the environment by inheriting changes caused by their use or disuse in parents.
These ideas were cond
Cladistics
Cladistics is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups based on the most recent common ancestor. Hypothesized relationships are based on shared derived characteristics that can be traced to the most recent common ancestor and are not present in more distant groups and ancestors. A key feature of a clade is that all its descendants are part of the clade. All descendants stay in their overarching ancestral clade. For example, if within a strict cladistic framework the terms animals, bilateria/worms, fishes/vertebrata, or monkeys/anthropoidea were used, these terms would include humans. Many of these terms are used paraphyletically, outside of cladistics, e.g. as a'grade'. Radiation results in the generation of new subclades by bifurcation; the techniques and nomenclature of cladistics have been applied to other disciplines. Cladistics is now the most used method to classify organisms; the original methods used in cladistic analysis and the school of taxonomy derived from the work of the German entomologist Willi Hennig, who referred to it as phylogenetic systematics.
Cladistics in the original sense refers to a particular set of methods used in phylogenetic analysis, although it is now sometimes used to refer to the whole field. What is now called the cladistic method appeared as early as 1901 with a work by Peter Chalmers Mitchell for birds and subsequently by Robert John Tillyard in 1921, W. Zimmermann in 1943; the term "clade" was introduced in 1958 by Julian Huxley after having been coined by Lucien Cuénot in 1940, "cladogenesis" in 1958, "cladistic" by Cain and Harrison in 1960, "cladist" by Mayr in 1965, "cladistics" in 1966. Hennig referred to his own approach as "phylogenetic systematics". From the time of his original formulation until the end of the 1970s, cladistics competed as an analytical and philosophical approach to systematics with phenetics and so-called evolutionary taxonomy. Phenetics was championed at this time by the numerical taxonomists Peter Sneath and Robert Sokal, evolutionary taxonomy by Ernst Mayr. Conceived, if only in essence, by Willi Hennig in a book published in 1950, cladistics did not flourish until its translation into English in 1966.
Today, cladistics is the most popular method for constructing phylogenies from morphological data. In the 1990s, the development of effective polymerase chain reaction techniques allowed the application of cladistic methods to biochemical and molecular genetic traits of organisms, vastly expanding the amount of data available for phylogenetics. At the same time, cladistics became popular in evolutionary biology, because computers made it possible to process large quantities of data about organisms and their characteristics; the cladistic method interprets each character state transformation implied by the distribution of shared character states among taxa as a potential piece of evidence for grouping. The outcome of a cladistic analysis is a cladogram – a tree-shaped diagram, interpreted to represent the best hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships. Although traditionally such cladograms were generated on the basis of morphological characters and calculated by hand, genetic sequencing data and computational phylogenetics are now used in phylogenetic analyses, the parsimony criterion has been abandoned by many phylogeneticists in favor of more "sophisticated" but less parsimonious evolutionary models of character state transformation.
Cladists contend. Every cladogram is based on a particular dataset analyzed with a particular method. Datasets are tables consisting of molecular, ethological and/or other characters and a list of operational taxonomic units, which may be genes, populations, species, or larger taxa that are presumed to be monophyletic and therefore to form, all together, one large clade. Different datasets and different methods, not to mention violations of the mentioned assumptions result in different cladograms. Only scientific investigation can show, more to be correct; until for example, cladograms like the following have been accepted as accurate representations of the ancestral relations among turtles, lizards and birds: If this phylogenetic hypothesis is correct the last common ancestor of turtles and birds, at the branch near the ▼ lived earlier than the last common ancestor of lizards and birds, near the ♦. Most molecular evidence, produces cladograms more like this: If this is accurate the last common ancestor of turtles and birds lived than the last common ancestor of lizards and birds.
Since the cladograms provide competing accounts of real events, at most one of them is correct. The cladogram to the right represents the current universally accepted hypothesis that all primates, including strepsirrhines like the lemurs and lorises, had a common ancestor all of whose descendants were primates, so form a clade. Within the primates, all anthropoids are hypothesized to have had a common ancestor all of whose descendants were anthropoids, so they form the clade called Anthropoidea; the "prosimians", on the other hand, form a paraphyletic taxon. The name Prosimii is not used in phylogenetic nomenclature, whic
New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
Upper Lusatia
Upper Lusatia is a historical region in Germany and Poland. Along with Lower Lusatia to the north, it makes up the region of Lusatia, named after the Slavic Lusici tribe. Both Lusatias are home to the West Slavic minority group of the Sorbs; the major part of Upper Lusatia belongs to the German state of Saxony comprising the Bautzen and Görlitz districts. The northwestern extremity around Ruhland and Tettau is incorporated into the Oberspreewald-Lausitz district of Brandenburg; the Polish part, east of the Neisse River, belongs to Lower Silesian Voivodeship. A small strip of land in the north around Łęknica, together with the Polish part of Lower Lusatia, is incorporated into Lubusz Voivodeship; the historic capital of Upper Lusatia is Bautzen, while the largest city in the region is Görlitz/Zgorzelec, halved between Germany and Poland since 1945. The name Lusatia superior was first recorded in a 1474 deed, derived from the adjacent Lower Lusatian lands in the north, which were just called the March of Lusatia.
The Upper Lusatian territory was referred to as Milsko in contemporary chronicles, named after the local West Slavic Milceni tribe also called Land Budissin. Geomorphological Upper Lusatia is shaped by the uniform Lusatian granite massif, only the north and northeast, the plain of the Upper Lusatian Heath and Pond Landscape is Pleistocene formed; the UNESCO has declared this area a Biosphere Reserve in 1996, in particular for the protection of otters. The middle part is hilly, while the south is characterized by the Lusatian Mountains, the westernmost range of the Sudetes; the highest elevations of the German part of Upper Lusatia are in the Zittau Mountains, part of the Lusatian Mountains forming the border with the adjacent Bohemian region in the south, which today belong to the Czech Republic. The highest peaks of the Zittau Mountains are the Lausche at 792.6 m and Hochwald at 749 m. The adjacent Lusatian Highlands comprise the Landeskrone, Löbauer Berg, Czorneboh and Valtenberg. However, the highest point of historic Upper Lusatia is the Tafelstein in the Polish part, located at 1,123 m on the eastern slopes of the Smrk in the Jizera Mountains, the border tripoint of Upper Lusatia with the historical region of Lower Silesia to the east and Bohemia to the south.
All major rivers in the Upper Lusatia flow from south to north. In the west, the Pulsnitz at Königsbrück marked the border with the Meissen lands of the Saxon Electorate; the Spree river has its source in the Lusatian Highlands in the far south of the country and flows through Bautzen. The Lusatian Neisse has formed the German-Polish border since 1945; the river rises in the Czech Jizera Mountains, enters Upper Lusatia near Zittau, flows through Görlitz/Zgorzelec and leaves the country at Bad Muskau for Lower Lusatia. Most of the smaller rivers are called -wasser in combination with the name of a village which the stream flows through; the eastern border of Upper Lusatia with Lower Silesia is marked by the River Kwisa, who flows past Lubań and continues north towards the Silesian lands into the Bóbr river. The central hilly Gefilde landscape between Kamenz and Löbau was well suited for agriculture and is still profitable. In the 19th century, in the northern part of Upper Lusatia, in the east on both sides of the Neisse river and around Hoyerswerda large quantities of brown coal were found.
The digging in open pits has destroyed large parts of the old cultural landscape. The Nochten pit south of Weißwasser and Turów near Bogatynia in the Polish part are still active. Many of the old coal mines have been restored since the 1970s after 1990, when particular attention was paid to revitalize the landscape; the newly formed lakes are named and advertised as the Lusatian Lake District. Today, Upper Lusatia is grouped into eight natural regions or landscapes: The Zittau Mountains The East Lusatian Hill Country and River Neisse region The Lusatian Highlands The Northwest Lusatian Highlands The Upper Lusatian Gefilde region The Upper Lusatian Heath and Lake District The Königsbrück-Ruhland Heaths in the northwest The Muskau Heath in the northeast The hunters of the Middle Stone Age only crossed through the area; the oldest agricultural cultures left behind only little evidence of settlement. In the early Bronze Age people of the Lusatian culture entered the uninhabited region from Bohemia and the Lusatian Neisse.
Archeological evidence documents a path between the settlement areas around Zittau. A fortified hill from the 10th century BC, the Schafsberg near Löbau, played a special role. Another significant settlement was on the cliff above the Spree river, where in the course of history Bautzens Ortenburg was built and administrative center of what would become Upper Lusatia. Slavs settled in the region since 7th century. In the area between today's cities of Kamenz and Löbau the tribe
Linnean Society of London
The Linnean Society of London is a society dedicated to the study of, the dissemination of information concerning, natural history and taxonomy. It possesses several important biological specimen and literature collections and publishes academic journals and books on plant and animal biology; the society awards a number of prestigious medals and prizes for achievement. A product of the 18th-century enlightenment, the society is important as the venue for the first public presentation of the Theory of Evolution; the patron of the society is Queen Elizabeth II. Honorary members include the present monarchs of Japan, Emperor Akihito, Sweden, King Carl XVI Gustaf, both of whom have active interests in natural history, the eminent broadcaster, Sir David Attenborough; the Linnean Society was founded in 1788 by botanist Sir James Edward Smith. The society derives its name from the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, the'father of taxonomy', who systematised biological classification through his binomial nomenclature.
He was known as Carl von Linné after his ennoblement, hence the spelling'Linnean', rather than'Linnaean'. The society had a number of minor name variations before it gained its Royal Charter on 26 March 1802, when the name became fixed as "The Linnean Society of London". In 1802, as a newly incorporated society, it comprised 228 fellows, it is the oldest extant natural history society in the world. Throughout its history the society has been a non-political and non-sectarian institution, existing for the furtherance of natural history; the inception of the society was the direct result of the purchase by Sir James Smith of the specimen and correspondence collections of Linnaeus. When the collection was offered for sale by the heirs of Linnaeus, Smith was urged to acquire it by Sir Joseph Banks, the eminent botanist and president of the Royal Society. Five years after this purchase Banks gave Smith his full support in founding the Linnean Society, he became one of the first Honorary Members of the new society.
The society has numbered many prominent scientists amongst its fellows. One such was the botanist Robert Brown, president. In 1854 Charles Darwin was elected a fellow. Another famous fellow was biologist Thomas Huxley, who gained the nickname "Darwin's bulldog" for his outspoken defence of evolution. Men notable in other walks of life have been fellows of the society, including the physician Edward Jenner, pioneer of vaccination, the Arctic explorers Sir John Franklin and Sir James Clark Ross, colonial administrator and founder of Singapore, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and Prime Minister of Britain, Lord Aberdeen. Since 1857 the Society has been based at Burlington House, London; the first public exposition of the'Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection', arguably the greatest single leap of progress made in biology, was presented to a meeting of the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858. At this meeting a joint presentation of papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace was made, sponsored by Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell as neither author could be present.
In 1904 the society experienced the novelty of electing women fellows. Whilst the society's council was reluctant to admit women, the fellows were much less so, with only 17% voting against the proposal. Among the first to benefit from this were: ornithologist and photographer Emma Louisa Turner, Lilian J. Veley, a microbiologist and Annie Lorrain Smith, a lichenologist and mycologist, all formally admitted on 19 January 1905. Amongst the first women to be elected in 1904 was the paleobotanist, pioneer of family planning, Marie Stopes; the society's connection with evolution remained strong into the 20th century. Sir Edward Poulton, president 1912-1916, was a great defender of natural selection and was the first biologist to recognise the importance of frequency-dependent selection; the first female president of the society was Irene Manton, who pioneered the biological use of electron microscopy. Her work revealed the structure of the flagellum and cilia, which are central to many systems of cellular motility.
Recent years have seen an increased interest within the society in issues of biodiversity conservation. This was highlighted by the inception in 2015 of an annual award, the John Spedan Lewis Medal honouring persons making significant and innovative contributions to conservation. Fellowship requires nomination by at least one fellow, election by a minimum of two thirds of those electors voting. Fellows may employ the post-nominal letters'FLS'. Fellowship is open to both professional scientists and to amateur naturalists who have shown active interest in natural history and allied disciplines. Having authored relevant publications is an advantage, but not a necessity, for election. Following election, new fellows must be formally admitted, in person at a meeting of the society, before they are able to vote in society elections. Admission takes the form of signing the membership book, thereby agreeing to an obligation to abide by the statutes of the society. Following this the new fellow is taken by the hand by the president, who recites a formula of admission to the fellowship.
Other forms of membership exist:'Associate', for supporters of the society who do not wish to submit to the formal election process for
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It stands on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of southern Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec; as of 2016, Ottawa had a city population of 964,743 and a metropolitan population of 1,323,783 making it the fourth-largest city and the fifth-largest CMA in Canada. Founded in 1826 as Bytown, incorporated as Ottawa in 1855, the city has evolved into the political centre of Canada, its original boundaries were expanded through numerous annexations and were replaced by a new city incorporation and amalgamation in 2001 which increased its land area. The city name "Ottawa" was chosen in reference to the Ottawa River, the name of, derived from the Algonquin Odawa, meaning "to trade". Ottawa has the most educated population among Canadian cities and is home to a number of post-secondary and cultural institutions, including the National Arts Centre, the National Gallery, numerous national museums. Ottawa has the highest standard of living in low unemployment.
With the draining of the Champlain Sea around ten thousand years ago, the Ottawa Valley became habitable. Local populations used the area for wild edible harvesting, fishing, trade and camps for over 6500 years; the Ottawa river valley has archaeological sites with arrow heads and stone tools. Three major rivers meet within Ottawa, making it an important trade and travel area for thousands of years; the Algonquins called the Ottawa River Kichi Sibi or Kichissippi meaning "Great River" or "Grand River". Étienne Brûlé regarded as the first European to travel up the Ottawa River, passed by Ottawa in 1610 on his way to the Great Lakes. Three years Samuel de Champlain wrote about the waterfalls in the area and about his encounters with the Algonquins, using the Ottawa River for centuries. Many missionaries would follow the early traders; the first maps of the area used the word Ottawa, derived from the Algonquin word adawe, to name the river. Philemon Wright, a New Englander, created the first settlement in the area on 7 March 1800 on the north side of the river, across from the present day city of Ottawa in Hull.
He, with five other families and twenty-five labourers, set about to create an agricultural community called Wrightsville. Wright pioneered the Ottawa Valley timber trade by transporting timber by river from the Ottawa Valley to Quebec City. Bytown, Ottawa's original name, was founded as a community in 1826 when hundreds of land speculators were attracted to the south side of the river when news spread that British authorities were constructing the northerly end of the Rideau Canal military project at that location; the following year, the town was named after British military engineer Colonel John By, responsible for the entire Rideau Waterway construction project. The canal's military purpose was to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, bypassing a vulnerable stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering the state of New York that had left re-supply ships bound for southwestern Ontario exposed to enemy fire during the War of 1812. Colonel By set up military barracks on the site of today's Parliament Hill.
He laid out the streets of the town and created two distinct neighbourhoods named "Upper Town" west of the canal and "Lower Town" east of the canal. Similar to its Upper Canada and Lower Canada namesakes "Upper Town" was predominantly English speaking and Protestant whereas "Lower Town" was predominantly French and Catholic. Bytown's population grew to 1,000 as the Rideau Canal was being completed in 1832. Bytown encountered some impassioned and violent times in her early pioneer period that included Irish labour unrest that attributed to the Shiners' War from 1835 to 1845 and political dissension evident from the 1849 Stony Monday Riot. In 1855 Bytown was incorporated as a city. William Pittman Lett was installed as the first city clerk guiding it through 36 years of development. On New Year's Eve 1857, Queen Victoria, as a symbolic and political gesture, was presented with the responsibility of selecting a location for the permanent capital of the Province of Canada. In reality, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had assigned this selection process to the Executive Branch of the Government, as previous attempts to arrive at a consensus had ended in deadlock.
The "Queen's choice" turned out to be the small frontier town of Ottawa for two main reasons: Firstly, Ottawa's isolated location in a back country surrounded by dense forest far from the Canada–US border and situated on a cliff face would make it more defensible from attack. Secondly, Ottawa was midway between Toronto and Kingston and Montreal and Quebec City. Additionally, despite Ottawa's regional isolation it had seasonal water transportation access to Montreal over the Ottawa River and to Kingston via the Rideau Waterway. By 1854 it had a modern all season Bytown and Prescott Railway that carried passengers and supplies the 82-kilometres to Prescott on the Saint Lawrence River and beyond. Ottawa's small size, it was thought, would make it less prone to rampaging politically motivated mobs, as had happened in the previous Canadian capitals; the government owned the land that would become Parliament Hill which they thought would be an ideal location for the Parliament Buildings. Ottawa was th
