No. 2,] DAWSON — POST-PLIOCENE. 173 



the Bay of Fundy ; and that heavy ice carried by this current 

 would then ground on Prince Edward Island, or be carried across 

 it to the Southward. If the Laurentian boulders came in this way, 

 their source is probably 400 miles distant in the Strait of Belle 

 Isle. On the North shore of Prince Edward Island, except where 

 occupied by sand dunes, the beach shows great numbers of peb- 

 bles and small boulders of Laurentian rocks. These are said by 

 the inhabitants to be cast up by the sea or pushed up by the ice 

 in spring. Whether they are now being drifted by ice direct 

 from the Labrador coast, or are old drift being washed up 

 from the bottom of the gulf, which north of the island is very 

 shallow, does not appear. They are all much rounded by the 

 waves, differing in this respect from the majority of the boulders 

 found inland. 



The older Boulder-clay of Prince Edward Island, with native 

 boulders, must have been produced under circumstances of power- 

 ful ice-action, in which comparatively little transport of material 

 from a distance occurred. If we attribute this to a sclacier, then 

 as Prince Edward Island is merely a slightly raised portion of 

 the bottom of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, this can have been no 

 other than a gio-antic mass of ice filling the whole basin of the 

 gulf, and without any slope to give it movement except toward 

 the centre of this great though shallow depression. On the other 

 hand, if we attribute the Boulder-clay to floating ice, it must 

 have been produced at a time when numerous heavy bergs were 

 disengaged from what of Labrador was above water, and when 

 this was too thoroughly enveloped in snow and ice to afford 

 many travelled stones. Farther, that this Boulder-clay is a sub- 

 marine and not a subaerial deposit, seems to be rendered probable 

 by the circumstance that many of the boulders of sandstone are 

 so soft that they crumble immediately when exposed to the wea- 

 ther and frost. 



The travelled boulders lying on the surface of the Boulder-clay 

 evidently belong to a later period, when the hills of Labrador and 

 Nova Scotia were above water, though lower than at present, and 

 were sufl&ciently bare to furnish large supplies of stones to coast 

 ice carried by the tidal currents sweeping up the coast, or by the 

 Arctic current from the North, and deposited on the surface of 

 Prince Edward Island, then a shallow sand-bank. The sands 

 with sea-shells prob.ibly belonged to this period, or perhaps to the 

 later part of it, when the land was gradually rising. Prince 



