222 BULLETIN: MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 



1 outlier of the crystallines from which the sedimentary cover lias 

 been swept by denudation. The island has been called by the "New- 

 foundland Pilot" "the most remarkable and unmistakable laud on the 

 Labrador coast." 1 Nothing could exceed the contrast between its char- 

 acter and that of the Mugford massifs. The light gray precipitous 

 two-thousand-foot peaks of the one oppose the black, tabular, greatly 

 dissected piles of the other. 



At Cape Mugford, which forms a nearly vertical sea-cliff about two 

 thousand feet in height, we were struck with the highly ferruginous 

 character of the sediments, broad bands of variously tinted iron-rust 

 enriching and enlivening the color effects in a marked degree. Numerous 

 waterfalls and extensive banks of snow leut welcome relief to the dark 

 cliffs, the black recesses of huge sea-chasms, and the savage gorge-like 

 iulets that opened one after another as our schooner slowly forged 

 through the "tide" around the cape. 



Fine as this scenery was, still greater magnificence awaited us as we 

 came face to face with the Bishop's Mitre toward the close of a memor- 

 able day of sailing. Seen from the northeast, the mountain, estimated 

 to be considerably more than three thousand feet in height, displays a 

 symmetry which is most remarkable in view of the fact that the pres- 

 ent profiles are everywhere the result of erosion. As the name im- 

 plies, there are two peaked summits. They are separated by a sharp 

 notch about five hundred feet in depth. This breach is but the upper- 

 most part of a gigantic ravine that cleaves the mountain to its base at 

 the shore more than two miles from the notch. Occupying the bottom of 

 the ravine an uninterrupted snow-bank still marked, in the month of 

 August, the line of symmetry of the whole mountain. From either peak 

 of the Mitre a rugged razor-back ridge descends, each gradually diverg- 

 ing from the other across the widening intervening trench. With essen- 

 tially equivalent transverse and longitudinal profiles, the two spurs 

 further match as each terminates at an elevation of about one thousand 

 feet, in a bold rock-tower. Each tower rises eight hundred feet or there- 

 abouts above the ridge-crest and, on the east, drops suddenly the full 

 eighteen hundred feet into the sea. The matching of the right and left 

 halves of the mountain does not stop with the form. Each of the sen- 

 tinel towers is composed above of black Mugford sediments reposing on 

 five hundred feet of the light gray gneissic complex. The architectural 

 quality of these great buttresses and of the Mitre itself is greatly en- 

 hanced when a fresh fall of snow brings out the nearly horizontal structure 



1 Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot (ed. 3, Hydrog. Office, London, 1897, p. 680). 



