PHYSICAL FEATURES OF NOVA SCOTIA.-MURPHY, 187 
their existence to originate from Moraines, because they appear to 
be of similar constitution to our sea beaches of to-day. 
In a paper read by Mr. Gilpin, Government Inspector of Mines 
for this Province, before the North of England Institute of Mining 
and Mechanical Engineers, he says :—“ There seems to have been 
two periods of attrition and transportation. The effects of the 
earlier are now visible in immense “ boar’s backs ” from 50 to 150 
feet in height and sometimes a mile in length, following a general 
north and south course;” and again he says: “A second and more 
local action is also visible, and by its agency the auriferious veins 
are usually found. This action has carried the quartzite and 
slate boulder from 100 to 1800 feet, on a course corresponding 
very nearly to that of the striz. Thus prospectors finding 
auriferous quartz boulders, costean to the North, and frequently 
trace the boulders to lodes corresponding in every respect to the 
boulders first found.” 
If our surface, as is shewn by research, has undergone great 
and remarkable vicissitudes during geological history, with alter- 
nating epochs of genial temperature and snow and ice, the 
striation and polishing of our rock surfaces may have been effected 
by glacial action; and subsequently another, and less destructive 
movement of the same nature, may have taken place which might 
account for the local drift according to the theory of Mr. Gilpin. 
1. GEOLOGICAL. 
Commencing at the shore of the Bay of Fundy, we first en- 
counter a thick bed of Amygdaloidal trap, varying in colour from 
~ gray to a dull red. It is full of cavities and fissures filled or 
coated with quartz and other associated minerals. It forms the 
-face of a cliff and rises vertically to a height of 110 feet, and 
from thence rises gradually with its associated slates and schists, 
until it attains a height of 595 feet in a distance of three miles; 
from thence it descends to the Annapolis valley, 345 feet below 
the summit, within the distance of a mile. 
We have now crossed the North Mountain, a narrow ridge not 
more than four miles wide at its base, and attaining a height of 
nearly 600 feet, and have reached the Annapolis Valley, which 
from here to the Village of Nictaux, a distance of 7 miles, is of 
