ii BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 



ARTICLE V. 



NOTES ON THE NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSI- 

 OGRAPHY OF NEW BRUNSWICK. 



By W. F. Ganong. 



-On the Color of the Water in New Brunswick Rivers. 



Read March 2nd, 1897; re-written April, 1898. 



New Brunswick is a land of splendid rivers. I have looked on the 

 maps in vain for an equal extent of country elsewhere which can show 

 so fine a series. For it might the words have been written : "A good 

 land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring 

 out of valleys and hills." 



Everyone who has been much with rivers must have felt that they 

 possess distinct characters or individualities. This character is a 

 subtle aggregate, but a leading physical component of it is the purity 

 and color of the water. The characters of our rivers I shall try else- 

 where to express ; I ask the Society now to consider the physical 

 problem involved in their colors. 



It is possible to find in the province every gradation between 

 the sluggish, heavily sedimented, almost black streams of the peaty 

 districts of Kent, Gloucester, and parts of Charlotte, and the rippling, 

 limpid streams of the central and northern watershed. The causes of 

 the color and opaqueness of the former are plain enough ; they leach 

 out the dark coloring matters of swamp and bog, together with much 

 of the flocculent organic matter. But the clear northern rivers, when 

 low in their stony beds, carry little sediment, and that not organic ; 

 but they show curious differences in color, for some of them are green 

 and others are brown. In thus speaking of color, I do not refer to 

 glint from their surfaces, nor the hue in rapids and waterfalls, but to 

 that which one sees at low water, when he looks through a s:ill surface, 

 nearly vertically, into a deep pool with gravel or boulder bottom. Seen 

 thus, the Restigouche is light green, and the Metapedia light brown ; 

 and where these two come together, one may run a canoe for three 

 hundred yards on a boundary so sharp that on the right all is clear 



