SABLE ISLAND—-MACDONALD, 265 
ArT. I1I.—Sasite Istanp, No. 3.— ITs PROBABLE ORIGIN AND 
SUBMERGENCE.—By Simon D. MACDONALD, F,G.S. 
(Read January 11, 1886.) 
Mr. President and Gentlemen, — 
I MAKE no apology for occupying your attention in discussing 
for the third time Sable Island, and its attendant phenomena. 
Independent of the call this Island makes to a rich and varied 
field for scientific research, there comes a deeper voice across the 
mad tumult of its breakers, and amid the storms that appear to 
vent their fury in its vicinity, asking in the interests of humanity 
for a wider knowledge of the causes which have associated such 
horrors with its very name. 
In addition to this, the proximity of this fatal Island to our 
shore,—the unfavorable reputation it has already given to our 
coast and its approaches, and the certainty of its complete sub- 
mergence at no distant day, with the probability of its becoming 
a still greater dread to the mariner.—makes this Island a proper 
subject of investigation for this Society, 
It comes within its province to observe and record for the 
benefit of not only the present but for the many future investi- 
gators, who will doubtless value everything of information left by 
us, and sean with eager glance in coming days the varied resume 
of facts we have collected, or left for them to theorize and 
debate upon. 
In my first paper I brought to your notice the Island gener- 
ally, its history, natural features, wrecks, ete; and also showed 
that from its geographical position situated at the interlacing of 
three of the most remarkable currents which encircle it with those 
swift eddies so fraught with destruction, whilst the atmospheric 
influences borne to it on the bosom of those dissimilar and oppos- 
ing currents, surround it with conditions not found elsewhere, 
and afford for meteorological purposes a point unsurpassed in 
the North Atlantic, 
