264 bulletin: museum of comparative zoology. 



amount of resistance offered by the bed-rock to wave-erosion, the degree 

 of protection afforded by outlying islands or shoals against the ocean- 

 swell, and lastly, the height of the beach above the sea. 



Near Cape Porcupine and north and south of Paul's Island, two 

 typical regions are seen where the drift seems to have been left by tbe 

 ice-sheet in much greater amount than elsewhere on the coast. Con- 

 sequently, the "beach" of other parts becomes a coastal plain at the 

 Cape, or a huge sand and gravel spit in the lee of many an island near 

 Ford Harbor. 



In Labrador, the fossil shore-lines have repeated the process exempli- 

 fied on the existing shore of eastern Newfoundland. The porphyritic 

 granite of Greenspond is suffering but very slow attack by the waves, 

 and the coast is there for many miles devoid of beaches. Approaching 

 Change Island from the south, one is struck by the more advanced 

 development of the shore-line as illustrated in the abundant pocket- 

 beaches and barrier-beaches wrought out of the fissile slates, quartzites, 

 and schists. 



Lying well within the island-belt, the hills about Rogue's Roost, Quirk 

 Tickle and Cutthroat Tickle possess comparatively few beaches. In 

 the time of submergence, the outer islands bore the brunt of erosion by 

 the waves ; the enfeebled Atlantic waves were unable to damage seri- 

 ously the bed-rock so that it should furnish an essential part of the 

 beach material. Where beaches do occur in this situation, they are 

 almost entirely composed of glacial erratics, — a constitution that goes 

 far to explain the usual contrast of the higher and lower beaches. The 

 latter are the better developed both as to size and to the degree of round- 

 ing which the erratics have suffered through wave wear. This contrast 

 is natural, for the lower deposits are mainly made up of boulders and 

 pebbles that have been derived from the upper part of the emerged 

 zone, and thus have been longer in the mill of the surf than the ma- 

 terials earlier lodged farther up the slope. At the same time, the loss 

 of bulk by attrition has not been sufficient to counterbalance the gain 

 to the lower beaches produced by the winning of erratics from above. 



On some of the sand beaches, dunes apparently fossil and dating from 

 a lower stand of the land, were discovered at varying heights above the 

 sea. These are especially large and numerous in West Bay just south 

 of Hamilton Inlet. At Pottle's Cove (West Bay) a fifteen-foot pocket 

 beach two hundred yards long has resting upon it a number of typical 

 dunes ; the top of one of these is forty-five feet above high water mark. 

 A much larger area of dunes fifteen to twenty feet high, covers an 







