Acadia or Acadie: The name originally given to Nova Scotia, but now only the poetical designation. It was granted by Henry IV, of France, November 8, 1603, to De Monts, a Frenchman, and a company of Jesuits who were finally expelled from the country by the English governor and colonists of Virginia, who claimed all that coast by virtue of its prior discovery by the Cabots in 1497. In 1621, Sir William Alexander, a Scotchman, applied to and obtained of James I a grant of the whole peninsula, which he renamed Nova Scotia, in

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