228 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [June, 



rapidly to the west that its direct action might not reach such 

 summits. 



Nor would I exclude altogether the action of glaciers in eastern 

 America, though I must dissent from any view which would 

 assign to them the principal agency in our glacial phenomena. 

 Under a condition of the continent in which only its higher peaks 

 were above the water, the air would be so moist, and the tempera- 

 ture so low, that permanent ice may have clung about mountains in 

 the teiuperate latitudes. The striation itself shows that there must 

 have been extensive glaciers as now in the extreme Arctic regions. 

 Yet I think that most of the alleged instances must be founded on 

 error, and that old sea-beaches have been mistaken for moraines. 

 I have failed to find even in the White Mountains any distinct sign 

 of glacier action, though the action of the ocean-breakers is visible 

 almost to their summits ; and though I have observed in Canada 

 and Nova Scotia many old sea-beaches, gravel-ridges, and lake- 

 margins, I have seen nothing that could fairly be regarded as the 

 work of glaciers. The so-called moraines, in so far as my obser- 

 vation extends, are more probably shingle beaches and bars, old 

 coast-lines loaded with boulders, trains of boulders or " ozars." 

 Most of them convey to my mind the impression of ice-action along 

 a slowly subsiding coast, forming successive deposits of stones 

 in the shallow water, and burying them in clay and smaller stones 

 as the depth increased. These deposits were again modified dur- 

 ing emergence, when the old ridges were sometimes bared by 

 denudation, and new ones heaped up. 



I shall close these remarks, perhaps Mlready too tedious, by a 

 mere reference to the alleged prevalence of lake-basins and fiords 

 in high northern latitudes, as connect* d with glacial action. In 

 reasoning on this, it seems to be overlooked that the prevalence 

 of disturbed and metamorphic rocks over wide areas in the north 

 is one element in the matter. Again, cold Arctic currents are the 

 cutters of basins, not the warm surface-currents. Further, the 

 fiords on coasts, like the deep lateral valleys of mountains, are 

 evidences of the action of the waves rather than of that of ice. 1 am 

 sure that this is the case with the numerous indentations of the 

 coast of Nova Scotia, which are cut into the softer and more shat- 

 tered binds of rock, and show, in raised beaches and gravel 

 ridges like those of the present coast, the levels of the sea at the 

 time of their formation. 



