APPExXDIX A XLV 



The life of the habitant is closely bound up with these marine 

 levels, especially on the precipitous north side of the peninsula, where 

 the mud of the old sea bottom often supplies a few fertile fields, and 

 the beach ridges of gravel provide the best of roads. The roads and 

 the villages strung out along them usually follow one of the lower 

 terraces, occasionally dropping to the Micmac terrace, the lowest of 

 all, rising only twenty feet above high tide. 



The marine terraces are highest at the west end of Gaspé, where 

 they reach more than 400 feet above the sea, and decline steadily 

 toward the east to about 150 feet. This corresponds, no doubt, to 

 the thinning of the ice sheet as it approached its eastern edge, the 

 rise of the land being greatest where the ice was thickest. 



The Rivers of Gaspé 



Most of the rivers of Canada have a very youthful character and 

 display many lakes and waterfalls and their channel is often poorly 

 defined. This is due to the work of the great ice sheets which blocked 

 all the old valleys with glacial debris and forced the rivers to follow 

 new routes. Gaspé, not having been covered by the main ice sheet, 

 has rivers of a much older habit, with few waterfalls, no lakes on their 

 lower stretches, and usually well graded channels, occupying in many 

 places deeply cut V-shaped valleys. 



On the north side of Gaspé, Ste. Anne and Chat rivers may be 

 navigated for thirty-five miles by canoes or small boats that are 

 poled up stream, and navigation ends on these small rivers right in 

 the heart of the mountains. On the Cascapedia river, following the 

 gentler southern slope of the peninsula, a team of horses can tow a 

 heavily loaded scow to the lumber camps 45 miles from the sea, 

 showing the well graded character of the river. The St. Anne and 

 Chat rivers have another extraordinary, and at first unaccountable, 

 feature. Both begin placidly in a lake on the south side of the moun- 

 tain range and then, more tumultuously, plunge through canyons 

 cut 2,000 or 3,000 feet below the summits on each side before the 

 lower navigable pa'rts begin. 



Why should these small rivers flow north through the highest 

 part of the mountains instead of following the natural slope of the 

 land southwards, like the Cascapedia? How did they carve their 

 way through the barrier of mountains? 



One cannot imagine them as flowing up hill to attack the moun- 

 tains, but one may suppose that when they began their work the 



