“+ À. R. C. SELWYN ON THE 
The part of the country selected by Sir William for this re-examination, which he 
carried on for four successive seasons, was in the valleys of the St. Francis and Nicolet 
Rivers, in the vicinity of Richmond and Danville, on the line of the Grand Trunk Railway 
In July, 1874, he asked me to accompany him to Richmond to look at some of the exposures 
and give him my opinion on the structure. I spent four days in this examination, but 
found it impossible without making a much more extended investigation to arrive at any 
conclusion on the points at issue. The following month, August, 1874, Sir William left 
Canada in failing health, but with the intention of returning the ensuing spring to con- 
tinue the work. In April, 1875, I received a letter from him respecting an arrangement he 
wished to make for a boring to be put down near Richmond, on the St. Francis River, with 
a view of finally settling the question of the relative positions of the black slates and lime- 
stones (lower black slates), then recently discovered to hold fossils, and the adjacent crys- 
talline dolomites and metamorphic schists. This caused me to ask him whether there 
was not in the Eastern Townships some place where the formations presented a less dis- 
turbed and complicated structure than they evidently did in the vicinity of Richmond and 
Danville and where the question could be-solved without resorting to the expensive pro- 
cess of boring. He replied that he did not know of any such place. This was the last 
communication I had with him. In the following August death closed his labours, and 
the projected boring was not carried out. It now devolved upon me either to publish the 
map as it stood or to personally investigate the whole matter and place myself in a position 
to decide which view was the correct one, or at least to corroborate one or other of the 
conflicting opinions. In the interests of truth I chose the latter though infinitely more 
troublesome course. 
The succeeding summer, 1876, I accordingly commenced a personal examination of the 
Quebec Group and continued it at intervals, as other duties permitted, during the seasons 
of 1877 and 1879. During these three seasons I have carefully, though not yet sufficiently, 
examined the country, crossing and re-crossing it, from the Vermont boundary to the north 
end of the Island of Orleans. I have also followed and closely examined the shores of the 
Lower St. Lawrence, from Kamouraska to a point about seventy miles south-west of Cape 
Rosier, in Gaspé, and I have followed, ortried to do so, mile after mile of the boundaries of 
the divisions of the Quebec Group as laid down on the map. 
I commenced the work strongly impressed with the idea of the correctness of Sir 
William Logan’s views, but I was soon compelled by the irresistible logic of facts, carefully 
examined on the ground, to adopt a different opinion and one very closely in accordance 
with the later views of Dr. T. Sterry Hunt, and as I now find from a careful study of Sir 
William’s reports of 1844-48, also in many respects agreeing with the early views of Sir 
William himself, but which afterwards appear, without any further or more extended 
examination of the area on his part, to have been changed, and a scheme of the structure 
substituted to accord with certain theories of metamorphism and with the very imperfect 
paleontological evidence which was then available. It will very naturally be asked 
whether I, a stranger to Canada and Canadian geology, was competent to revise the conclu- 
sions of such an expert as my predecessor, Sir William Logan, undoubtedly was. And it 
seems desirable, even at the risk of being liable to the accusation of egotism, to state briefly 
what my qualifications were in this regard. I may, then, say that my early training in 
