OF LABRADOR AND MAINE. 255 



this fauna is limited to Hudson's Bay, the coast of Labrador, and the northern coast of New- 

 foundland. Southward it follows the line of floating ice, which partially excludes Anticosti, 

 but includes both the Grand Banks, and those shoals lying to the southwestward along the 

 track of the polar current, which on the coast of New England flows between the coast 

 and the inner edge of the Gulf Stream ; along this line lie the Banks, off Nova Scotia, 

 and Maine, and Massachusetts, together with the St. George's Banks and the Nantucket 

 Shoals. Its influence is likewise felt as far south as the shoals lying off the coast of New 

 Jersey. This current would even seem to impinge slightly upon the north side of Cape 

 Hatteras, where Redfield supposes its final influence to have been felt. Returning again to 

 the shores of the British Colonies, we find this Shoal or Syrtensian fauna most curiously in- 

 terwedged with the Acadian or New England fauna. This is owing, without doubt, to the 

 overlapping of the Gulf Stream upon the great polar current. Thus, while the mouth of 

 the Bay of Fundy is properly a Syrtensian outlier, the head of the bay, the coast of New 

 Brunswick, the western side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the mouth of the river St. Law- 

 rence on its southern side, and a small isolated area on the southern coast of Newfound- 

 land, sheltered from the polar current sweeping by Cape Race, and on which a small 

 branch of the Gulf Stream may possibly impinge, are outlying areas inhabited by 

 species most characteristic of the coast of New England north of Cape Cod, constituting 

 a fauna termed by Professor Dana the Nova Scotian Fauna, and by Liitken, the Acadian 

 Fauna. Thus between Greenland and Cape Cod there are two distinct faunas : the Aca- 

 dian, with outliers situated north of its normal limits, due to the influence of the Gulf 

 Stream, or, perhaps, to the absence of the polar current ; and the Syrtensian or Lab- 

 rador fauna, peopling the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland, sending outliers far 

 southwards, due to the influence of the polar current. Any attempts to split up this area 

 into smaller subordinate districts or faunae than these must prove unsuccessful, as such dis- 

 tinctions would be highly artificial. 



Having shown how these three faunte are limited at the present day, it remains to no- 

 tice how this distribution differed in Quaternary times. The arctic or polar current must 

 have sent a branch through the present course of the St. Lawrence River into Lake Cham- 

 plain, in a general southwestern direction. This current was evidently a continuation of 

 the present Belle Isle current, which even now pushes the cold waters of the Straits far up 

 beyond the island of Anticosti beneath the fresh waters of the St. Lawrence River. It has 

 been noticed by Dr. Dawson, 1 who has satisfactorily shown the effects of this powerful St. 

 Lawrence current, that the post-tertiary fauna of the St. Lawrence, as it has been studied 

 by him at Montreal, Riviere du Loup, and Quebec, was in all its features purely Syrtensian, 

 and identical with that of the colder portions of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and especially 

 the coast of Labrador. 



The clay beds of Canada synchronize and agree in their general features very nearly 

 with those of Maine, as has been already observed by Dr. Dawson. All the beds to the 

 eastward of the Saco River afford a Labrador fauna. About Portland and on the Saco 

 River we are, however, on the limits of the post-tertiary Acadian fauna. Certain common 

 Syrtensian and purely arctic forms there dwindle in size and diminish very sensibly in 

 numbers, and a few arctic species are replaced by Acadian forms. 



1 Address of Principal Dawson before the Natural History west striation of the valley was " from the ocean toward the 

 Society of Montreal, May, 1864, published in the Cana- interior against the slope of the St. Lawrence valley." p. 9. 

 dian Naturalist, where he shows that the general south- 



111 '.I' Hi: , BUST. SOC. NAT. HIST. Vol. I. Pt. 2. 65 



