36 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Feb. 



bution of icebergs, with the glaciated condition of our continents, 

 with the remarkable fact that the same effects now produced by 

 the ice and the Arctic current in the strait of Belle-Isle and the 

 deep-current channel off the American coast, are visible all over 

 the North American and European land north of forty degrees of 

 latitude, and that there is evidence that the St. Lawrence valley 

 itself was once a gigantic Belle-Isle, in which thousands of bergs 

 worked perhaps for thousands of years, grinding and striating its 

 rocks, cutting out its deeper parts and heaping up in it quantities 

 of northern debris. Out of this fact of the so-called glaciated 

 condition of the surface of our continents, has however arisen one 

 of the great controversies of modern geology. While all admit 

 the action of ice in distributing and arranging the materials which 

 constitute the last coating which has been laid upon the surface 

 of our continents, some maintain that land glaciers have done the 

 work, others that sea-borne icebergs have been the agents employed. 

 As in some other controversies, the truth seems to lie between the 

 extremes. Glaciers are slow, inactive and limited in their sphere. 

 Icebergs are locomotive and far-travelled, extending their action 

 to great distances from their sources. So far, the advantages are 

 in favor of the iceberg. But the work which the glacier does is 

 done thoroughly, and time and facilities being given, it may be 

 done over wide areas. Again, the iceberg is the child of the 

 o-lacier, and therefore the agency of the one is indirectly that of 

 the other. Thus, in any view we must plough with both of these 

 o'eoloo-ical oxen, and the controversy becomes like that old one of 

 the Neptunists and Plutonists, which has been settled by admitting 

 both water and heat to have been instrumental in the formation 

 of rocks. 



Our country is one of those which have been most thoroughly 

 glaciated, and in the midst of these controversies a geologist 

 resident here should have some certain doctrine as to the 

 question whether at that period, geologically recent, which we 

 call the Post-pliocene period, Canada was raised to a great height 

 above the sea, and covered like Greenland with a mantle of per- 

 petual ice, or whether it was, like the strait of Belle-Isle and the 

 banks of Newfoundland, under water, and annually ground over 

 by icebergs. A great advocate of the glacier theory has said that 

 we cannot properly appreciate his view without exploring 

 thoroughly the present glaciers of Greenland and ascertaining 

 their effects. This I have not had opportunity to do, but I have 



