No. 5.] HIND — NORTH-EASTERN LABRADOR. 269 



not only denuding rock masses, but also in moving the debris 

 down the least slope which can give motion to a snow bank. 



We are apt to underrate the mechanical effects of snow when 

 we see it uniformly spread, as in Canada, over the surface, where 

 trees prevent drifting ; but when high winds, combined with a 

 snow fall of six to ten feet is piled in great masses on the lea 

 side of hills, it becomes a mechanical agent possessing enormous 

 power constantly acting, if the drift be permanent. Even at the 

 present day the snow fall throughout much of the forest covered 

 portion of British North America, forms a sheet, as we shall 

 presently see, averaging six feet in thickness, and constitutes a true 

 snow zone. If this sheet could be gathered into great wind-rows, 

 as it really is on the exposed and treeless Labrador coast, its me- 

 chanical force would be called into play in a very striking manner. 



VII. — Amount of Snow-fall in North-Eastern America. 



The snow-fall on the coast of North-Eastern Labrador is very 

 considerable, but not nearly so great as one would suppose from 

 the vast accumulations on lea slopes and in ravines facing the 

 east or south-east. As far as I could gather from the accounts 

 of the Missionaries, Esquimo and resident trappers on the 

 coast, the snow does not, in general, exceed eight feet in the 

 woods, when it is protected from winds. Judging by this rude 

 method, the annual snow-fall may average some thirty or forty 

 inches more than in the Maritime Provinces of the Dominion, 

 or some parts of Ontario. But this zone of snow, even when 

 we confine its limits to a depth not more than five feet on the 

 level or about 60 inches, allowing for evaporation, is a power, when 

 moved by winds and thrown into drifts, which, under favourable 

 circumstances, exercises an influence ju moulding the outline of 

 the surface to an extraordinary extent, and is strictly comparable 

 with the more striking, because concentrated effects, of other 

 forms in which frozen water or vapour is seen to act. 



But a snow drift remaining throughout the year on an exposed 

 slope, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, gliding down to a lower 

 level, affords of itself no measure of the mechanical work it 

 directly effects by gravity and motion. It is a never-ceasing 

 agent for condensing the vapour of the atmosphere, and to the 

 mechanical effect it produces by its own weight as snow, must be 

 added the effect produced by the moisture it condenses from the 



