[parks] presidential ADDRESS 21 



Outside the Government Service we have little reason to be 

 proud of the achievements of Canadians in our subject. The en- 

 thusiasm for local collecting has practically died out and little has 

 been done to incite public interest in stratigraphy. The fault must 

 lie in our educational system; but the whole subject, while of vital 

 importance, does not come within the scope of this address. 



The history of the past twenty years deals so intimately with 

 the achievements of the writer's immediate contemporaries that he 

 must be pardoned for a very sketchy review without any pretension 

 of doing justice to the many workers in the field. 



We start the period with the framework of the stratigraphie 

 column fairly well established over the whole of accessible Canada 

 and with a considerable degree of detail in parts, particularly in the 

 east. It is proposed to record the more important advances miade 

 under the following geographic subdivisions: Maritime Provinces, 

 Quebec, Older Ontario, Hudson Bay Slope, The Great Plains, The 

 Cordillera. 



Maritime Provinces 



We have to record in the first place the continued labours of the 

 veterans, Matthew and Bailey, of Ells and of Fletcher. The two 

 former are still with us; but the latter two were permitted to live and 

 work scarcely through the first decade of the century. Dr. E. R. 

 Faribault belongs to both periods; his work in Nova Scotia extends 

 from 1885 to the present day and his name will be forever associated 

 with the geology of the gold-bearing rocks of Nova Scotia. 



The later generation of geologists of the Maritime Provinces may 

 be said to begin with Dr. G. A. Young, whose first report for the 

 Survey, a description of the Lake St. John district, appeared in 1900. 

 Later Dr. Young did much work in New Brunswick, chiefly of an 

 economic nature. 



We have now to deal with a policy and its results — ^the oppor- 

 tunity offered by the Survey to graduate students to acquire materials 

 for theses. The policy itself requires no explanation and is highly 

 commendable; the only unfortunate feature is that nearly all the 

 students thus favoured were proceeding to degrees in American 

 universities. We are more concerned with the results which are 

 important additions to the detailed stratigraphy of selected areas. 

 Perhaps Dr. M. Y. Williams may be considered the first of this class 

 of workers; he was engaged in studying the famous Silurian section 

 at Arisaig, N.S., in 1910; in 1912 appeared his dissertation for the 

 doctorate at Yale and in 1914 his Memoir "Arisaig-Antigonish 

 District." 



