98 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Yol. vii. 



Atlantic, and a fewareundescribed. When it is considered that 

 only five weeks were spent at sea, that during that time the or- 

 dinary duties upon which the schooners were engaged (and some 

 times unfavourable weather) often made dredging quite imprac- 

 ticable, also that I was alone (so far as scientific help was con- 

 cerned) nearly the whole time, I may be pardoned for thinking 

 that the results of these investigations, so far as they go, are very 

 encouraging and such as should stimulate to renewed exertions 

 in so promising a field of inquiry. 



I have previously shown (in the 'Canadian Naturalist' for 1869) 

 that a large proportion of the Greenland invertebrates, probably 

 three fourths of the whole, range as fiir south as the northern 

 part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence down to Gaspe Bay. In Canada 

 many marine animals (such as, for example, the oyster and the 

 two species of Crepidula which are found attached to it) occur 

 a little to the south of the Bay of Chaleurs, but not in the 

 Bay itself. A number of characteristic New-England sjDecies in- 

 habit the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, most of which 

 do not apparently range further north than the Bay of Chaleurs. 

 On the Admiralty Charts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, an 

 irregular line of 60 fathoms soundings may be seen to extend 

 from a little above the northern extremity of the Island of Cape 

 Breton, round the Magdalen group, and thence, in a westerly 

 direction, to Bonaventure Island. To the south and south-west 

 of this line the water is uniformly somewhat shallow, while to the 

 north, north-west, and north-east the water deepens rapidly, and 

 in some places precipitously. Principal Dawson suggests that 

 the Subcarbouiferous rocks of which the Magdalen Islands are 

 composed, and which appear again on the mainland, in Bonaven- 

 ture County, may possibly crop up under the sea in the area 

 between the north-west side of Cape Breton and the mainland of 

 New Brunswick, as well as that of the counties of Bonaventure 

 and Gaspe, in the Province of Quebec. This may account, for 

 the shallowness of the water in the area in question. Whether 

 this is the case or not, it seems not improbable that the submarine 

 plateau inside of this line of shallow soundings, may form a 

 natural barrier to those arctic currents- which sweep down the 

 Straits of Belle Isle in a south westerly direction, and may tend 

 to deflect their course in a bold curve into and up the river St. 

 Lawrence. 



In the centre of this river, opposite Murray Bay, about 80 



