244 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. vii. 



of the river of the same name, in his account of his voyages of 

 discovery prosecuted during the years 1789 to 1793, says that 

 alono; the eastern side of the moantains there exists " a narrow 

 strip of very marshy, boggy, and uneven ground, the outer edge 

 of which produces coal and bitumen ; these I saw on the banks 

 of the Mackenzie River, as far north as Lat. QQ^. I also dis- 

 ■covered them in my second journey at the commencement of the 

 Rocky Mountains, in 56"^ N. Lat. ; 120 W. Long. ; and the 

 «arae was observed by Mr. Fiddler, one of the servants of the 

 H. B. Company, at the source of the South branch of the Sas- 

 katchewan, in about Lat. 52; L^u^. 112^ 30'." He also de- 

 scribes near the Peace River, " several chasms in the earth which 

 emitted heat and smoke which diffused a strong sulphurous 

 stench,' — probably a case of the spontaneous combustion of a lig- 

 nite bed comp ir.ible with those observed in other localities. Sir 

 John Franklin in his second journey to the Polar Sea, noticed 

 what he calls beds of lignite or tertiary pitch-coal at Garry's 

 Island off the mouth of the Mackenzie River, and also an ex- 

 tensive deposit near the Babbaic River, on the coast of the 

 Arctic Sea, opposite the termination of the Richardson chain of 

 the Rocky Mountains. Sir J. Richardson, who accompanied 

 Franklin in the expedition just referred to, was one of those 

 eno-ao'ed in the search for him in subsequent years, and mentions 

 in his account of a boat voyage on the Mackenzie and in the 

 vicinity of G-reat Bear River, a species of coal which when re- 

 cently extracted is massive but shows woody structure, the beds 

 appearing to be made up of pretty large trunks, the fibre of 

 which is contorted. He says that when this coal is exposed a 

 short time to air it splits into rhomboidal fragments, which again 

 separate into thin layers, and much of it eventually fulls into a 

 €oarse powder. When exposed to moist air, it takes fire and 

 burns with a fetid smell, but with little smoke or flame. Some 

 varieties resemble charcoal, and others are conchoidal likecannel 

 •coal. Amber is also noticed to occur, and the beds of coal are 

 often destroyed as exposed by their spontaneous inflammability. 

 This description and the account given of the associated clays 

 and shales might almost as well apply to some localities in the 

 southern part of British America or to the lignite tertiary for- 

 mation of the Missouri River. 



In the United States the first observers of this formation ap- 

 pear to have been Lewis and Clarke, who, in the narrative of 



