APPENDIX — SUMMER CAMP AT FREXCH LAKE. 85 



creeks and thoroughfares ; and at the more commanding spots 

 one might naturally look for indications of occupancy by a rude 

 people. Such indications are not wanting, but they did not 

 occur in the way anticipated from the exploration of village sites 

 along the Bay of Fundy. There, when the sites were undisturbed 

 by the plow, one had no difficulty in seeing the situation and 

 extent of the village, nor in tracing the outlines of each particular 

 hut-bottom, nor noting the place of the sleeping berths, the position 

 of the door, nor in counting, if necessary, the hearth stones. 



But on the shores of these inland sheets of water, no such 

 evidence of the habits of the former savage inhabitants could be 

 found. At the points of land along the shores of the lakes, at 

 the entrances of the thoroughfares, or where creeks led into 

 ponds in the marshes, no hut-bottoms were found, but proofs 

 of the presence of man were frequent in the shape of broken 

 pottery, flint flakes, or lost celts, arrowheads and axes. It was 

 evident that the people who lived along these shores had means 

 of traversing the water by canoes or otherwise, and planted 

 their habitations where water communication was easy, and fish 

 plentiful. But it is also clear that their shelters were of a tem- 

 porar}^ kind, and built near the water's edge. 



Their mode of life in this way along the banks of the 

 streams, explains why we find not the least trace of their habi- 

 tations. These lakes, with their connecting streams and marshy 

 borders, disappear in the spring time, for the flood of water 

 poured out by the great tributaries of the St. John submerge all 

 this region, and produce for the time a great inland lake 

 extending up the valley of the St. John to Fredericton on the 

 one hand, and the Oromocto valley on the other, covering 

 ing about six hundred square miles of surface. It may rise 

 above the summer level to a height of twenty feet or more, and 

 with a wide range for the waves, would, in stoimy weather, 

 throw a surf on the shores that would soon demolish the dwel- 

 lings of a rude people, and mingle even their more enduring 

 implements and weapons, left or lost on the site of their 

 encampment, with the pebbles and sand of the beach. Such, no 

 doubt, was the fate of many an implement which otherwise 

 would have remained on the surface of the ground to the present 

 day, to bear witness to avocations of the fisherman and the 

 hunter, pursued during the Stone age along these grass-grown 

 shores. 



These lake basins date back as far as the time of the deposi- 

 tion of the Champlain clays or Leda clay; and the material of 

 the clays is that with which we are familiar as stock for the 



