224 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [June, 



cliffs from which to collect ; and it must have carried boulders for 

 hundreds of miles, and left them on points as high as those they 

 were taken from. On the Montreal Mountain, at a height of 

 600 feet above the sea, are huge boulders of feldspar from 

 the Laurentide hills, which must have been carried 50 to 100 

 miles from points of scarcely greater elevation, and over a 

 valley in which the striae are in a direction nearly at right angles 

 with that of the probable driftage of the boulders. Quite as strik- 

 ing examples occur in many parts of this country. It is also 

 to be observed that boulders, often of large size, occur scattered 

 through the marine stratified clays and sands containing sea-shells ; 

 and whatever views may be entertained as to other boulders, 

 it cannot be denied that these have been borne by floating ice. 

 Nor is it true, as has been often affirmed, that the boulder-clay is 

 destitute of marine fossils. At Murray Bay and St. Nicholas, on 

 the St. Lawrence, and also at Cape Elizabeth, near Portland, there 

 are tough stony clays of the nature of true " till," and in the lower 

 part of the drift, which contain numerous marine shells of the 

 usual Post-pliocene species. 



4. The Post-pliocene deposits of Canada, in their fossil remains 

 and general character, indicate a gradual elevation from a state of 

 depression, which on the evidence of fossils must have extended to 

 at least 500 feet, and on that of far-travelled boulders to nearly ten 

 times that amount, while there is nothing but the boulder-clay to 

 represent the previous subsidence, and nothing whatever to repre- 

 sent the supposed prt^vious ice-clad state of the land, except the 

 scratches on the rock surfaces, which must have been caused by 

 the same agency which deposited the boulder-clay. 



5. The peat deposits with fir-roots, found below the boulder- 

 clay in Cape Breton, the remains of plants and land-snails in 

 the marine clays of the Ottawa, and the shells of the St. Lawrence 

 clays and sands, show that the sea at the period in question had 

 much the temperature of the present arctic currents of our coasts, 

 and that the land was not covered with ice,but supported a vegetation 

 similar to that of Labrador and the north shore of the St. Law- 

 rence at present. This evidence refers not to the later period of 

 the Mammoth and Mastodon, when the re-elevation was perhaps 

 nearly complete, but to the earlier period contemporaneous with 

 or immediately following the supposed glacier-period. In my 

 former papers on the Post-pliocene of the St. Lawrence, I have 



