XLII THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



clement winds by the lofty wall of mountains and face the well- 

 named bay of Chaleur. Thus the two sides have different climates, 

 the north with chill summers and a very long and snowy winter, 

 while the south has a comparatively long and warm summer, with a 

 winter no worse than that of Montreal. 



The Building of the Shickshocks 



The building of a mountain range requires long and laborious 

 preparation. In the case of the Shickshocks the preparation went on 

 during the earlier half of the Palaeozoic and included the laying down 

 of thousands of feet of sediments, mainly on a shallow sea bottom, 

 but partly on land. In Cambrian and Ordovician times the sediments 

 were of mud, gray, or reddish, or black with organic matter, but 

 including some beds of sand. Toward the end of the Ordovician 

 there were dry land conditions and an extraordinary boulder con- 

 glomerate with great and small blocks of limestone and of eruptive 

 rocks was spread out along what is now the northern rim of Gaspé. 

 The source of these stones is unknown, since no rocks like them occur 

 in the region; but one may suppose that they came from land now 

 beneath the sea. The size of the boulders in the conglomerate sug- 

 gests the work of ice, but final proof of glacial action has not yet been 

 reached. 



Then come shallow seas again in which Silurian shales and lime- 

 stones were deposited, often charged with fossils. In the early 

 Devonian Gaspé was once more dry land, however, clothed with a 

 primitive vegetation instead of a possible ice sheet. Psilophyton, 

 distantly related to the modern club mosses, was wide spread, the 

 earliest known land plant. 



During the Devonian important mountain building operations 

 took place; the earlier rocks being squeezed into closed folds or broken 

 into slices by thrust faults and driven by an overwhelming push of 

 the sea bottom against the solid resistance of the Archœan continent 

 to the north. It is likely that similar thrusts had occurred before, 

 but the relations of the rocks are too tangled and obscure to be quite 

 sure of this. 



As a consequence of the folding and faulting of the beds more 

 ancient underlying rocks, pre-Cambrian schists, were thrust up in the 

 axis of the rising mountain range far above their original level; and 

 at the eastern end of the hard schists fissures were opened through 

 which great quantities of molten matter welled up, now found as 



