THE IPSWICH SPARROW. 9 



from the same quarter, and wrecked materials to the main station. But during the 

 winter of 188 1 a severe gale opened a gulch near the east end, which has so drained 

 it that it is now only eight miles long, and so shallow as to be useless for transport. 

 The destructive agency of the sea appears farther in the ridge which separates 

 the lake from the sea on the south. Originally it was half a mile wide, with hills 

 upwards of fifty feet in height, now it is a narrow beach, in some places not more 

 than a hundred yards wide and so reduced in height that the sea breaks over it in 

 stormy weather. Should this barrier be removed, the work of demolition will go on 

 more rapidly than ever. (Pp. 43-44.) 



The fragments of lii.story here presented have been gatliered from many 

 sources, and selected with a view to showing the vicissitudes through which 

 all animal life on the island must have passed. It now remains for me to 

 describe the island as I found it in 1894. 



Physical Aspect of Sable Island. 



The geologists tell ns Sable Island is either the remains of a sand 

 continent of remote glacial origin or, more probably, a vast heap of glacial 

 detritus brought from the north by the ice-floes of a more modern period 

 and heaped up by existing ocean currents.' At all events, it now forms 

 the ribbon-like crest of a submerged bank two hundred miles long by ninety 

 in breadth, similar to those extending from Newfoundland to the shoals of 

 Nantucket. A scant twenty miles of rolling sand-hills is all that remains 

 today above the surface of the ocean, some of the sand mountains attaining 

 an elevation of eighty feet and resembling in almost every particular save 

 greater size the stretches of sand dunes to be found along our Atlantic sea- 

 board, — the same treeless aspect, the same sparse covering of coarse 

 beach-grass, the same deserts of shifting white sand. But on Sable Island 

 in the hollows among the hills and often to their very summits, grasses 

 grow luxuriantly in many places, and a large part is carpeted with the 

 evergreen Crowberry (^Empetrum nigrum L.) and Juniper {Jimiperus 

 nana Willd.) which are very characteristic productions. Between the 

 two lighthouses it stretches in the form of a slender crescent, the 

 concavity towards the Nova Scotia coast distant at its nearest point 

 eighty-six geographical miles. The horns of the crescent extend at 



' S. D. Macdonald, ' Sable Island, no. 3, its probable origin and submergence,' Trans. N. S. Inst. 

 Nat. Sci., VI, pt. iv, 1886, 265-280. 



