94 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. vi. 



to press lieav% on projecting ledges of rock and exposed shoulders 

 of hills. Hence the rocks along the sides of glaciers are striated 

 and smoothed in a manner similar to that of the rock surfaces in 

 New England and Canada. 



Extensive as Alpine glaciers are now, they are insignificant 

 compared with what they are shown to have been in former times, 

 by the moraines and boulders which they have left in the low 

 lands, both north and south of the Alps. They are known to 

 have extended fifty miles or more downward from the mountain 

 tops into the valley of the Po. On the north side of the Alps 

 existed a great glacier filling the valley of the Rhone, and extend- 

 ing in the direction of Neufchatel. This great sheet of ice is 

 asserted to have been from 4000 to 5000 feet in thickness, and to 

 have had a slope from the summit of Mont Blanc to the Juras of 

 very nearly one degree. It is also at a height of about 5000 feet 

 that the limit of glacial striation is reached in the New England 

 hills. Mountains which have an elevation of 4000 feet have striae 

 across the summit, but neither the tops of the White Hill nor 

 (according to Prof. C. H. Hitchcock) that of Mount K'tahdin, 

 in Maine — 5300 feet high — are striated. Assuming that Acadia 

 was, during the drift period, covered by a great glacial sheet, 

 such as now exists in Greenland, and formerly filled the valleys 

 of Switzerland, let us endeavour to get some idea of its probable 

 form and depth. In doing so we should bear its physical features 

 in mind. New Brunswick, as a whole, is a country of plains, 

 rolling uplands, and low hill ranges. It has a group of eminences 

 near its northern border, of which only one is known to be more 

 than 2500 feet above the sea. Another knot of hills exist near 

 the Chepetrieticook Lakes, on the western border ; and a series 

 of overlapping ridges, none of which much exceed 1000 feet in 

 elevation, along the southern coast. There is not such a slope in 

 the surface of the land as that which in New England may have 

 given momentum to the glacial mass. The general course of the 

 drift striae on the hio-her elevations in the central and northern 

 part of New Brunswick, is said to vary from south to two de- 

 grees east of south. This is also the course of the grooves obser- 

 ved at the higher levels in the Southern Hills, and it may be 

 regarded as the probable course of the glacier in the eastern part 

 of New Brunswick at the time of its fullest development. Such 

 being the form and motion of this continental mass of ice, a por- 

 tion would have crossed the Bay Chaleur at Gaspe, traversed the 



