No. 4.] HIND — NORTH-EASTERN LABRADOR. 231 



ing them into the sea, but each year causing them to assume 

 more and more the boulder form. While clearing the ridges 

 and planes on the sea floor it is piling or rather pushing the 

 worn blocks into depressions and accumulating the debris in the 

 shallow ocean valleys. In a word, it is doing before our eyes 

 over a coast line many hundred miles in length, what has been 

 done in earlier times over a vast area of the North American 

 Continent, according as fresh surfaces by a rise or subsidence of 

 the land were brought under the powerful and searching influ- 

 ence of pan ice aided by an Arctic current. 



The influence of the Arctic Current shows itself throughout 

 the Island zone, in a remarkable manner, giving rise with each 

 change of the tide to ever varying eddies. Its speed through 

 the Islands is greater than beyond their limits, where the fisher- 

 men estimate it at a knot to a knot and half an hour. Sailing 

 among the Islands the fishermen going north-west generally 

 count sixty miles sailing distance as equivalent to moving eighty 

 miles through the water, on account of the current, which re- 

 sembled that of a Great river. 



4. — Extent of Pan Ice Work. 



The amount of work done by pan ice during the gradual rise 

 of the land, is well shown by the polished surfaces and sides of 

 hills many hundred feet above the sea level. I had no opportu- 

 nity of testing by actual touch its abrading effects to a greater 

 altitude than six hundred feet above the ocean, but I saw after 

 rain the smooth glistening surfaces in great profusion over the 

 steep sides of mountains at a much greater elevation. Erratics 

 and local rounded fragments of rock are not numerous until a 

 height exceeding one thousand feet is attained, and even then, 

 except perhaps in hollows, which I had no opportunity of ex- 

 amining, boulders and perched rocks are very much less numer- 

 ous that at greater elevations in the far interior, where I saw 

 them in countless multitudes in 1861. Below the level of per- 

 haps twelve hundred feet they have been made and removed by 

 pan and coast ice, and the country in this respect presents a 

 counter part to the Upper Moisie Valley, where the " remarka- 

 ble absence of erratics on the Moisie until an altitude of about 

 1000 feet is attained, may be explained by the supposition that 

 they may have been carried away by icebergs and coast ice 



