78 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



kno-wTi as kettle holes in the moraines, the site of stranded blocks of ice 

 among the terminal deposits. 



It is also surmised that the ice sheet was general not only over the 

 whole island but that it extended, across the straits from Labrador 

 moving eastward to the open sea and carried with it immense quanti- 

 ties of detrital matter which were deposited over the area we know as 

 the Banks, the great fishing ground of Newfoundland. At the period of 

 elevation the continent, no doubt, extended to the eastward and included 

 the area about the Virgin rocks and the Eastern shoals, the extreme 

 (gathering ground for the glacial drift carried and pushed eastward by 

 the Banks, the great fishing ground of Newfoundland. 



Eeverting again to our own shores fjords are nearly as much in 

 evidence as they are in Newfoundland though they have not the same 

 depths of water. A few exceptional depths are, however, reported. 

 Close to Canseau Harbour in Chedabucto Bay there is a deep giving 124 

 fms. ; inside the Little Bras d'Or another showing 114 fms., and the 

 centre of Bedford Basin has a sounding of 220 feet. A depression which 

 was occupied by ice while the glacier was in motion that brought to the 

 Atlantic drift from the north Mountain of King's County. A glacier 

 that formed the ground moraines of McNab's and George's Islands in the 

 main harbour of Halifax and which deposited drift against an ice front 

 that extended down into the water at Purcell's Cove. 



Here is an excellent local illustration on a small scale of that re- 

 markable feature, prominent in some Newfoundland fjords where the 

 water is shallower outside than at the head. At Purcell's Cove the drift 

 was so piled up against the ice front as to form a small and secure 

 harbour and leave an island when the ice disappeared. It has made of 

 that locality a charming resort for people from the city in which to 

 spend a summer holiday. 



These references to the ice age all point to the important part 

 played by glacial phenomena in shaping the configuration of the sub- 

 merged platform. Prior to which epoch the harbours, estuaries and bays 

 of the south shore had taken shape and influenced direction to the sea- 

 ward flow of all the drift to the east of Shelburne where the more power- 

 ful stream of ice in the Ba}f of Fundy drew with it much of the ice 

 along its shores and so deflected the general course of the flow from east 

 of south to westward of the meridian. The striœ grooves and kames 

 of the western part of the province point to this conclusion. The 

 courses of the preglacial river channels below the foreshore though 

 generally obliterated by littoral deposits are here and there exposed. 



]\Ir. Prest notes the exposure of a narrow and deep channel of tor- 

 tuous course walled by Cambrian slates that extended from the mouth of 



