[HARRINGTON ] GEORGE MERCER DAWSON 189 
ihe Cretaceous and Laramie formations; and he discovered the presence 
in the Cretaceous of Southern Alberta of an important series of rocks 
— the Belly River group — which, he says, “must be considered on the 
whole as a fresh-water formation.” The Kootanie group was also rec- 
ognized by him as constituting a portion of the early Cretaceous in the 
Rocky Mountain region. His study of a large area in the interior pla- 
teau region of British Columbia established the existence there of a 
great series of mica-schists and gneisses supposed to be of Archean age, 
and succeeded by Cambrian, Ordivician, Silurian and Carboniferous 
strata; while in the Cordilleran region of the same province he 
described the occurrence of great deposits of contemporaneous volcanic 
rocks, in various stages of metamorphism. While working in connec- 
tion with the Boundary Commission also, he studied the crystalline 
rocks in the Lake of the Woods district, and concluded that a consid- 
erable portion of the Huronian formation there consists of metamor- 
phosed volcanic rocks. He was a careful student of glacial phenom- 
ena and, according to Dr. G. J. Hinde,’ was the first to describe the 
glacial origin of the Missouri Coteau, and in the’ interior of British 
Columbia, he has shown that at one period of the Ice Age there was a 
confluent ice-mass, the surface of which stood at a level of 7,000 feet 
above the sea, and that it must have been at least from 2,000 to 3,000 
feet in thickness. He further established the fact that the movements 
of the glacier ice in this region were not only to the south and south- 
east, and through the transverse valleys and gaps of the coast ranges 
to the ocean, but that it had also a northerly flow, and passed down the 
valleys of the Pelly and Lewes branches of the Yukon river. Dr. Daw- 
son also maintained that the northern part of the great plains had been 
submerged, and that their glaciation was in the main due to floating 
ice. 
With regard to his ethnological work we cannot do better than 
quote from Mr. W. J. McGee’s appreciative notice in the American 
Anthropologist. Mr. McGee says: “ While several of Dr. Dawson’s 
titles and the prefatory remarks in some of his papers imply that his 
ethnological researches were subsidiary to his geological work, and while 
his busy life never afforded opportunity for monographie treatment ot 
Canada’s aborigenes, it is nevertheless true that he made original obser- 
vations and records of standard value, that much of his work is still 
unique, and that his contributions, both personal and indirect, materi- 
ally enlarged knowledge of our native tribes. It is well within bounds 
to say that in addition to his other gifts to knowledge, George M. Daw- 

1Geol. Magazine, May, 1897. 
