442 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Dec. 



part of the peninsula, bordering on the gulf of the St. Lawrence, 

 the glaciers evidently moved southward down the slope from 

 the water-shed in the interior. On the eastern or Atlantic coast, 

 at both sides of the mouth of Hamilton Inlet, which is forty 

 miles wide, there are glacial lunoid furrows, like those observed 

 in Maine by Dr. Delaski, which tend to piove by their direc- 

 tion that a glacier forty or fifty miles in breadth filled this great 

 fiord, and moved in an easterly direction from the water-shed in 

 the interior, thence debouching into the sea. 



Owing to the powerful disrupting agency of the frost and ice, 

 the rounded and denuded rocks of Labrador have as yet revealed 

 but few glacial strise. The distribution of the boulders is restrict- 

 ed to the higher levels of the plateau. To find them in any 

 abundance, it is necessary to ascend from 500 to 800 feet 

 above the sea, where they occur in profusion. Below this they 

 have been rolled, rounded, and rearranged into ancient sea 

 beaches. But on the smooth polished quartzites and syenites, 

 the former of which are levelled into broad plains grooved and 

 furrowed and afterward polished almost like glass, with shallow 

 depressions, being glacial troughs filled with water, and forming 

 countless pools, and on the rounded syenitic hills which assume 

 dome-like or high conical sugar-loaf forms, we see everywhere in 

 Labrador, below a level of 2000 feet, the traces of ancient glacier 

 action exhibited on a vast scale. 



At the close of the Glacial epoch the moraine matter was re- 

 assorted into marine deposits, which in this country have been 

 exposed to a general and sweeping denudation. Only small 

 patches are found remaining in sheltered positions. These ma- 

 rine deposits consist of finely laminated clays resting upon 

 coarser, more stony, and gravelly beds. The former were evi- 

 dently estuary deposits, the latter thrown down in deeper water, 

 where the strong Arctic current prevailed. The oldest beds are 

 the coarser strata, which, as in Maine, occur at high-tide mark. 

 The more recent beds occur from ten to twenty feet above the 

 sea level. 



The fossil Invertebrata, found abundantly in these beds, afford 

 excellent material for comparison with the present marine fauna 

 of Labrador, and throw new light on the distribution of marine 

 life during the close of the Glacial epoch. The assemblage is 

 thoroughly Arctic in character, but, when compared with lists of 

 the glacial shells of the north of Europe, it is found to bear a. 



