﻿284 POINT DE WITT CLINTON. August, 



there lay a talus of uiimelted drift-snow. In 1826, 

 though we passed along this coast nearly a month 

 earlier in the season, we observed much fewer 

 of this kind of memorial of the preceding winter, 

 and that year, the flowering plants were more 

 plentiful, and the vegetation generally more luxu- 

 riant. The deterioration of the climate after 

 rounding Cape Parry became daily more and 

 more evident to us, though we had decreased our 

 latitude above a degree since leaving Cape Bathurst. 

 The presence of a large body of warmer water, 

 carried into the Arctic Sea by the Mackenzie, may 

 have some influence in ameliorating the temperature 

 within the limits of that wide estuary ; but I am 

 inclined to think that Wollaston and Banks's Lands, 

 by detaining much drift-ice in the channels which 

 separate them from one another and from the main 

 shore, have a still more powerful eff*ect in lowering 

 the summer temperature. 



At Point de Witt Clinton the cliffs are formed of 

 flesh-coloured beds of limestone interleaved with 

 bluish-grey beds, and containing fibrous and com- 

 pact gypsum in veins. These clifl:s are forty or 

 fifty feet high, and are covered to a considerable 

 depth with diluvial loam, containing fragments of 

 sandstone, limestone, and trap rocks, some of them 

 rolled, others angular. The surface of the loam is 

 undulated ; and, about a quarter of a mile from the 



