GASPEREAU VALLEY, NOVA SCOTIA—HAYCCOCK. 373 
the action of underground water while finding its way to the 
surface through the fissures of the fractured zone of the 
Gaspereau fault. These veins, though newer than the slate in 
which they occur, are still older than the Carboniferous sand- 
stones that overlie them and contain abundant fragments of 
the white quartz of which they are composed. If the interpre- 
tation of their origin be correct, it follows that the fault along 
which they were formed had its beginnings before the Car- 
boniferous period. The outlining of the Wolfville ridge was 
contemporanecus with the formation of the fault, and its 
Pre-Carboniferous origin is thus indicated. 
The simplest interpretation of the strip of sandstone dipping 
into the southern brow of this ridge is that it was deposited 
along the southern shore when the ridge projected eastwards, 
as a low point, into the Carboniferous sea. Contemporaneous 
beds of similar material were deposited on the north side of the 
point of land. The whole area gradually subsiding, the coarse 
sandstones that lined the coast in shallow water crept farther 
and farther up the slopes, covering the low point of slate as the 
water level rose upon the land. Subsequently, as farther move- 
ment along the fault plane took place, these newer beds were 
broken and their ends pushed upward along its northern side 
until elevated above the sea and laid bare by ages of erosion, we 
now see them apparently dipping into the hill of slate along 
which they were deposited as approximately horizontal beds 
when the hill itself was a low point of land on the coast of a 
Carboniferous bay. 
The Triassic sandstones have not yet been observed in the 
Gaspereau Valley along the line of section, although there seems 
to be no good reason for there not being found if they exist 
there. A reasonable interpretation of their absence is that when 
the Triassic sandstones that occur at corresponding levels on the 
north side of the ridge in the Cornwallis Valley were being laid 
down as a shallow water formation, along a slowly subsiding 
coast, the displacement along this fault plane had not taken place 
to its present extent and the land surface south of the fault was 
