30 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
of the British Isles. The three principal Gulf Islands are historie Cape 
Breton, garden-like Prince Edward Island, and Anticosti, which, though 
the least of the three, is over a hundred and twenty miles long. There 
is a whole zone of difference between the north and south shores of 
the Gulf, between the gaunt sub-arctics of Labrador and the tall maize 
fields and lush meadow lands of Acadia, where, as the old French 
writers all assure us, “everything will grow that grows in France, ex- 
cept the olive.” 

The Gulf is the deepest of river mouths—a deep sea of its own, 
round all its shores, with lonely deep-sea islands—St. Paul’s, Brion, 
the Magdalens, and Bird Rocks. The Magdalens are a long and 
brilliant crescent of yellow sand-hills, bright green grass, dark green 
clumps of spruce, and red cliffs of weathered sandstone. But Deadman’s 
Island stands gloomily apart, its whole bulk forming a single monstrous 
corpse, draped to the water’s edge. The Bird Rocks are two sheer 
islets, ringed white from base to summit with lines of sea-gulls. A 
lighthouse now occupies the top of the larger Rock; but, on a moonlight 
night, the smaller still looks like a snow-capped mountain, from the 
mass of gannets asleep on it. 
The Gulf has many wild spots, but none so wild as Labrador. And 
this is all the more striking, because of the closeness of civilization, 
old and new. At Bradore Bay you are in view of the continual come 
and go of ocean liners. Yet, along the shore, from here west to Natash- 
quan, you will find plenty of waste places, with nothing between them 
and the Pole, except a few Indians and Eskimo. No part of the con- 
tinent of America is so close to Europe as Labrador, which may also have 
been the first part of the New World visited by the Norsemen in the 
tenth century. Yet the interior of it is less known in the twentieth 
than Central Africa or Alaska. It is of immense extent. Both its 
north-to-south and east-to-west beelines are over a thousand miles. 
And between these four points lie wildernesses of rocky tablelands, 
covered with a maze of waters. It is a savage land—ruthless and bare 
and strong—that seems to have risen overnight from chaos, dripping 
wet. The bewildered streams hardly know which way to find the sea. 
Most of them flow along the surface in changeable shallows, as if they 
had not had time to cut their channels; and many lakes discharge 
in more than one direction. Labrador, indeed, is to-day very much 
as the Great Ice Era left it thousands and thousands of years ago. 
But even glacial times are modern compared with its real age. Its 
formation is older, far older, than man; even if we go back to his earliest 
anthropoid ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is 
older than the original progenitors of all our fellow-beings, millions 
of years ago. For it is the very core of the great azoic Laurentians, 
