8 



species, that apparently do not occur on the European side of the North 

 Atlantic. Not one of their names, except doubtfully that of the Dentalitivi , 

 is to be found in the list of ninety-three species of " Boreal shells common 

 to Europe and North America," on pages 358 and 359 of Woodward's 

 "Manual of the MoUusca." 



Every other part of the region under consideration, whether the water be 

 deep or shallow, seems to be tenanted by a northern, cold water and sub- 

 arctic, but perhaps scarcely arctic or polar fauna, which gradually merges 

 into a purely arctic assemblage near the Arctic Circle. This cold water 

 ■fauna occupies not only the deeper parts of the Bay of Fundy, the colder 

 -waters of the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia and by far the greater part of 

 the Gulf and mouth of the River St. Lawrence, but also, apparently, the 

 Atlantic coast of Labrador, Hudson Strait, and most of the coast of Hudson 

 Bay. At any rate, the marine invertebrata of the three last mentioned 

 localities, so far as known, are remarkably f-imilar to those of the River and 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence. In the case of the mollusca, the only species from 

 Labrador that have not yet been found in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are 

 Acmoea rubella, which, however, occurs in Willis' list of Nova Scotian shells, 

 and Crenella faha, if that shell be distinct from C. pectinula. Similarly, in 

 small collections received of late years from four localities in Hudson Strait 

 and the east coast of Hudson Bay, the only mollusca noticed that have not 

 yet been found in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are Portlandia glacialis and 

 Jdargarita umhilicalis. 



This cold water assemblage Packard has called the " Syrtensian fauna," 

 a term which, unfortunately, is not free from objections, for more reasons 

 than one. In the first place, in eastern Canada it is the Acadian that is 

 the only exclusively shallow water fauna, and in the next the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence, as a whole, is rather a deep than a shallow depression. In its 

 deepest part, about half way between the eastern extremity of the Island of 

 Anticosti and the Bird Rocks, it is 313 fathoms deep, and a considerable 

 portion of its area is deeper than 100 fathoms. In the writer's judgment, 

 the fauna which Packard calls the Syrtensian is the west Atlantic portion 

 of the true Boreal fauna, which seems to "extend across the Atlantic," not 

 so much from " Nova Scotia and Massachusetts," as stated by S. P. Wood- 

 ward (on page 357 of his Manual of the Mollusca), but from Maine, Nova 

 Scotia, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Atlantic coast of Labrador, " to 

 Iceland, the Faeroe and Shetland islands, and along the coast of Norway 

 from North Cape to the Naze." 



Collections made by the Stearns expedition to the Labrador coast, by Dr. 

 Bell and Mr. Low, show also that some species that have been dredged in 

 the (xulf of St. Lawrence in comparatively deep water, occur to the north- 

 ward in much shallower water. Thus, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Pecten 



