494 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



being essentially a seaboard country. The visitor has the 

 advantage of being able to see a great deal of it — and the finest 

 parts, too — without getting out of touch with his movable base 

 afloat. And the country itself has the corresponding advantage 

 of being less liable to be turned into a commonplace summer 

 resort by the whole monotonising apparatus of hotels and 

 boarding houses and conventional " sights." 



From the topmost heights of Evolution whole realms of 

 Nature appear, infinitely surpassing all those of business, sport 

 and tourist recreation; the theory of Evolution itself is the 

 crowned brain of the entire Animal Kingdom. But I doubt 

 whether, as yet, we fully realise that Labrador is absolutely 

 unique in being the only stage on which the prologue and 

 living pageant of Evolution can be seen together from a single 

 panoramic point of view. The sea and sky are everywhere the 

 same primeval elements. But no other country has so much 

 primeval land to match them. Labrador is a miracle of youth 

 and age combined. It is still growing out of the depths with 

 the irresistible vigour of youth. But its titanic tablelands consist 

 of those azoic rocks which form the very roots of all the other 

 mountains in the world, which are so old, so immeasurably 

 older than any others now standing on the surface of the globe, 

 that their Laurentians alone have the real right to bear the title 

 of "The Everlasting Hills." Being azoic these Laurentians are 

 older than the first age when our remotest ancestors appeared 

 in the earliest of animal forms, millions and millions of years 

 ago. They are, in fact, the only part of the visible Earth which 

 was present when Life itself was born. So here are the three 

 great elemental characters, all together — the primal sea and 

 sky and land — to act the azoic prologue. And here, too, for all 

 mankind to glory in, is the whole pageant of animal life : from 

 the weakest invertebrate forms, which link us with the illimitable 

 past, to the mightiest developments of birds and mammals at 

 the present day, the leviathan whales around us, the soaring 

 eagles overhead and man himself — the culmination of them all — 

 and especially migrating man, whose incoming myriads are 

 linking us already with the most pregnant phases of the future. 

 Where else are there so many intimate appeals both to the child 

 and the philosopher ? Where else, in all this world, are there 

 any parts of the Creation more fit to exalt our visions and make 

 us "Look, through Nature, up to Nature's God?" 



