268 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. Vlii. 



beneath them, that the uptilted beds of the parent rock in situ 

 were seldom seen. " Clearly," aays Mr. Lieber, u that force which 

 had riven its beds asunder, no other than the frost, had broken 

 the rest from their foothold and prepared them for removal by 

 another coming- into play at a later season ; the thawing down- 

 gliding snow" •' Many of the blocks were probably but slightly 

 removed from their original position, perhaps barely turned over 

 or merely forced a little out of place. Yet the eifect to the eye 

 of the beholder would be as great as if they had been transported 

 hundreds of miles." 



" When we descended from the mountain we crossed over a 

 broad patch of snow, deeply packed, twenty feet deep, which 

 clearly taught us how the blocks were moved. In truth this 

 was a miniature glacier, and a regular moraine was piled up along 

 its edges. It is impossible for us to form any estimate of the 

 amount of snow which may fill per square foot in a winter, but 

 from the fact that such quantities were still remaining late in 

 July, and certainly they never altogether thaw away, we may 

 reasonably infer that during its downward progress, either as 

 snow or water, a tremendous force must be exerted, a force 

 quit3 sufficient to account for the characteristic surface pheno- 

 mena just described." 



Scoresby's account of the effects of frost on the rocks of 

 Spitzbergen. agrees with Air. Lieber's descriptions. This eu- 

 terprising discoverer and observer notices also the movements 

 of masses of broken rock down the steep sides of hills, when 

 disturbed, and their bounding down the declivities and lodging 

 in a bank of snow, two thousand feet below his point of observa- 

 tion. 



Angular blocks of gneiss and other rock species are con- 

 stantly met with on the Labrador in protected valleys, such as 

 English River, and they may also be seen in Newfoundland and 

 elsewhere in much lower latitudes, pointing to the separation of 

 the blocks at the joints by alternate freezing and thawing, and 

 their probable subsequent movement by means of snow. It is 

 to the polishing and striating effects of snow drifts that I would 

 also wish to direct attention. 



There is on the Labrador no "soil cap" to produce the 

 motion of blocks of strata recently described by Sir C. W. 

 Thomson in the February number of ' Nature," 1 but there is, 

 nevertheless, a powerful agent in snow and wind combined, in 



