1866.] DAWSON — ICEBERGS AND GLACIERS. 35 



When we examine a chart of the American coast, and observe 

 the deep channel and hollow submarine valleys of the Arctic cur- 

 rent, and the sand-banks which extend parallel to this channel 

 from the great bank of Newfoundland to Cape Cod, we cannot 

 avoid the conclusion that the Arctic current and its ice have great 

 power both of excavation and deposition. On the one hand, deep 

 hollows are cut out where the current flows over the bottom, and 

 on the other, great banks are heaped up where the ice thaws and 

 the force of the current is abated. I have been much struck 

 with the worn and abraded appearance of stones and dead shells 

 taken up from the banks off the American coast, and am convinced 

 that an erosive power comparable to that of a river carrying 

 sand over its bed, and materially aided by the grinding action of 

 ice, is constantly in action under the waters of the Arctic current. 

 The unequal pressure resulting from this deposition and abrasion, 

 is not improbably connected with the slight earthquakes experienced 

 in Eastern America, and also with the slow depression of the 

 coast ; and if we go back to that earliest of all geological periods 

 when the Laurentian rocks of Sir Win. Logan, constituting 

 the Labrador Coast and the Laurentide Hills, were alone above 

 water, we may even attribute in no small degree to the Arctic 

 current of that old time the heaping up of those thousands of feet 

 of deposits which now constitute the great range of the Alleghany 

 and Appalachian mountains, and form the breast-bone of the 

 American continent. 



But such large speculations might soon carry us far from Belle- 

 Isle, and to bring us back to the American coast and to the 

 domain of common things, we may note that a vast variety of 

 marine life exists in the cold waters of the Arctic current, and 

 that this is one of the reasons of the great and valuable fisheries 

 of Labrador, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, regions in which 

 the sea thus becomes the harvest field of much of the human 

 population. On the Arctic current and its ice also floats to the 

 southward the game of the sealers of St. John and the whalers of 

 Gaspe. The distance that some of these creatures come, is shown 

 by the fact that I once found upon the skin of a whale killed by the 

 Gaspe fishermen, a species of acorn-shell (Coronula regince, Darwin,) 

 supposed to be peculiar to the Pacific, an evidence that the crea- ' 

 tare had navigated the Arctic channels from Behring's Straits to 

 be slain in the gulf of Saint Lawrence. 



We may now proceed to connect these statements as to the distri- 



