84 GLACIAL AND SURFACE GEOLOGY OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 



ferred from the authorities cited above. Two observers have been especially 

 active in this direction, and have published their views on the subject at 

 considerable length ; these are Mr. G. M. Dawson, to whom reference has 

 been previously made, and Dr. R. Brown, who devoted a part of the years 

 1864 .and 1866 to an official scientific examination of the island.* The titles 

 of the papers published by the last-named explorer, in which the subject of 

 Northern Drift is discussed, are given below ; but the last one published, 

 namely, the one in the American Journal of Science, will be chiefly used in 

 this connection, as containing the latest and fullest exposition of his views. 

 In this paper Dr. Brown remarks as follows: "So for from the Northern 

 Drift being absent from Vancouver Island and British Columbia, it is present 

 in as marked a manner as ever I saw it in countries celebrated for the 

 presence of such remains." This is much stronger language than had been 

 previously used by the same observer in a communication published some 

 years earlier, and immediately after the completion of his woik on the island. 

 In that statement he speaks only once of glacial and drift phenomena, 

 and that in a chapter of his communication which is credited to other per- 

 sons, it being stated at its beginning that it was compiled from accounts 

 furnished by four of his employes, who appear not to have been scientific ob- 

 servers, one of them at least being an Indian guide and hunter. t The para- 

 graph in question reads as follows, in an English translation: "These hills 

 appear to be made up of masses of Plutonic rock, covered with a thin layer 

 of humus, here and there strewn with erratic blocks, -wliich form a j^art of 

 the Great Northern Drift formation, to be found all over Vancouver Island. 

 Indeed, some of the principal edifices of Victoria are built of a gray syenite 

 which is not to be found in silii nearer than Alaska." It is hardly necessary 

 to call attention to the extraordinary character of this last statement, ^lut 

 forth by one who had never made any detailed examination of the country to 

 the north.t A similar disregard to scientific accuracy of statement will be 



* See Mr. Dawson's paper "On the Superficial Geology of Britisli Columbia," Quarterh- Journal of the Geo- 

 logical Society, Vol. XXX IV. p. 89. 



Dr. Brown's principal papers are : Das lunere der Vancouver Insel, in Petermann's Mittheilungen for 1869, 

 p. 1 ; On the Geographical Distribution and Physical Characteristics of the Coal- Fields of the North Pacific 

 Coast, in Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society, Vol. I. p. 305 ; On the Supposed Absence of the 

 Northern Drift from the Pacific Slope of the Rocky Mountains, in the American Journal of Science, Second 

 Series, Vol. L. p. 318. 



+ See Petermann's Mittheilungen, 1869, p. 4. 



X All that Dr. Brown had seen of the region to the north of Vancouver Island seems to have been comprised in 

 a hasty visit to the Queen Charlotte Islands. 



