so ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



field methods the results to be obtained from a systematic exploration 

 of the beds of this district would be of the greatest possible value from a 

 palœontological and general geological standpoint. 



Before turning our attention to the life of Pleistocene times, the 

 next to be considered, as no vertebrate fossils have been collected from 

 rocks of Miocene and Pliocene age in Canada, it is necessary to mention 

 certain fishes from British Columbian Tertiary beds that have been 

 assigned with some doubt to the Oligocène. 



16. Tertiary fishes. — The fishes referred to above are Plecto- 

 spondyli of the family of Cyprinidse belonging to the genus Amyzon. 

 There are two species, the first A. hrevipinne from the Similkimeen 

 river, British Columbia, the second an undetermined species of the 

 same genus from the Horse Fly river of the same province. 



17. Fauna of the Pleistocene. — In the Pleistocene we come to 

 forms the majority of which now exist. The several species of fishes 

 found in the Leda clay of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa valleys are 

 well-known living forms common in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and along 

 the Atlantic coast. The only remains of birds are some undetermined 

 bones that were obtained many years ago from the Leda clay at Mont- 

 real, and an impression of a small feather beautifully preserved in a 

 nodule collected from the same deposit at Green's creek near Ottawa 

 in 1881. Delphinapterus leucas {Beluga catadon), the white whale, 

 white porpoise or beluga, is an Arctic species that at present occurs 

 as far south as the Gulf of St, Lawrence, finding its way up the river 

 of that name past Murray Bay; it is more abundant on the north than 

 on the south shore of this river. The remains of this species have 

 been found in the Pleistocene at Jacquet river, N.B., and at Eivière 

 du Loup (en bas), Montreal and Cornwall. Megaptera hoops (M. 

 longimana), the humpback whale, exists now in all seas. Some of the 

 bones of a skeleton of this s^Decies were found in 1882 in a Pleistocene 

 gravel deposit near Smith falls, Ontario. The Mastodon (Mammut) 

 and Mammoth, judging from the wide distribution and number of their 

 remains, must have been plentiful over a very large portion of this 

 country, the range of the Mastodon extending from the east to what is 

 now Manitoba, that of the Mammoth reaching eastward from the 

 Pacific almost across the continent. Eemains of one-toed horses have 

 not been found in Canada, although so well-loiown from the Pleistocene 

 of various parts of the United States, including Alaska. Marsh re- 

 garded the North American continent as the true home of the horse. 

 It still existed here in the early part of the Quaternary period, and 

 may have been a contemporary of prehistoric man. We know, however, 

 that the native races at the advent of the white man to this continent 

 k-new nothing of the horse. There are few records of the finding of 



