THE IPSWICH SPARROW. 9 
from the same quarter, and wrecked materials to the main station. But during the 
winter of 1881 a severe gale opened a gulch near the east end, which has so drained 
it that it is now only eight miles long, and so shallow as to be useless for transport. 
The destructive agency of the sea appears farther in the ridge which separates 
the lake from the sea on the south. Originally it was half a mile wide, with hills 
upwards of fifty feet in height, now it is a narrow beach, in some places not more 
than a hundred yards wide and so reduced in height that the sea breaks over it in 
stormy weather. Should this barrier be removed, the work of demolition will go on 
more rapidly than ever. (Pp. 43-44.) 
The fragments of history here presented have been gathered from many 
sources, and selected with a view to showing the vicissitudes through which 
all animal life on the island must have passed. It now remains for me to 
describe the island as I found it in 1894. 
PuystcaL AsPpECT or SABLE ISLAND. 
The geologists tell us Sable Island is either the remains of a sand 
continent of remote glacial origin or, more probably, a vast heap of glacial 
detritus brought from the north by the ice-floes of a more modern period 
and heaped up by existing ocean currents.! At all events, it now forms 
the ribbon-like crest of a submerged bank two hundred miles long by ninety 
in breadth, similar to those extending from Newfoundland to the shoals of 
Nantucket. A scant twenty miles of rolling sand-hills is all that remains 
today above the surface of the ocean, some of the sand mountains attaining 
an elevation of eighty feet and resembling in almost every particular save 
greater size the stretches of sand dunes to be found along our Atlantic sea- 
board,— the same treeless aspect, the same sparse covering of coarse 
beach-grass, the same deserts of shifting white sand. But on Sable Island 
in the hollows among the hills and often to their very summits, grasses 
grow luxuriantly in many places, and a large part is carpeted with the 
evergreen Crowberry (Hmpetrum nigrum L.) and Juniper (Junzperus 
nana Willd.) which are very characteristic productions. Between the 
two lighthouses it stretches in the form of a slender crescent, the 
concavity towards the Nova Scotia coast distant at its nearest point 
eighty-six geographical miles. The horns of the crescent extend at 
1S. D. Macdonald, ‘ Sable Island, no. 3, its probable origin and submergence,’ Trans. N. S. Inst. 
Nat. Sci., VI, pt. iv, 1886, 265-280. 
2 
