1868. | Reviews. 495 
the settlement of the north-eastern boundary, who have had the 
bad taste to suggest that “the old and beautiful name Acadia ” had 
its origin in the Indian appellation of a kind of codfish. 
Our author having thus given vent to his colonial indignation, 
settles down as a first-rate exponent of the Geology of the Acadian 
provinces. Commencing with the modern period, he gives a most 
interesting account of the Micmae “ pre-historic ” relics, belonging 
to a “stone-age” which existed in Acadia not more than 300 
years ago; and he shows that, in the course of between two or 
three centuries, large areas have passed through the following 
phases:—(1) Primitive Forest; (2) Second-growth Forest; (3) 
Burned Barren ; and (4) Cultivated Fields. 
Dr. Dawson belongs to the straightest sect of the severely 
orthodox, and the moral that he draws is that man may not have 
made his first appearance on the earth at anything like so early 
a date as we ‘‘auld warld” folks believe. 
The Post-pliocene period is represented by raised beaches, ter- 
races, gravel ridges, marine clay, and, oldest of all, a wide-spread 
deposit of boulder-clay, the formation of which is, in the main, 
referred by Dr. Dawson to the action of floating ice; and he con- 
siders that glaciers played a very small part in bringing together 
these various drift-deposits. 
The Acadian geologist then encounters a vast gap —a lapse of 
geological time of immense duration entirely unrepresented,—for 
the whole of the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene deposits are 
entirely absent, while the Cretaceous, Oolitic, and Liassic strata 
are equally wanting. The cause of this hiatus is debatable; pro- 
bably it was that the Acadian region formed dry land during those 
immensely long and continuous epochs; but it is possible, though 
barely so, that they were buried at a great depth beneath an ocean 
over whose bottom no deposits were accumulated ; it is also within 
the range of belief that strata of these periods were once formed in 
Acadia, and have since been entirely swept away. 
Triassic rocks form almost the whole of Prince Edward’s Island, 
and occur also as a narrow belt along the eastern shore of the Bay 
of Fundy; but the period immediately preceding it—the Permian 
—is another blank in the history of this region, unless we may 
regard the upheaval and contortion of the Carboniferous strata as 
preserving for it a species of illustration. 
The Carboniferous period is richly represented both by rocks 
and by fossils; and the greater portion of Dr. Dawson’s book is 
occupied with its description. Much of this material, however, has 
been previously published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geo- 
logical Society, and has been noticed in our Chronicles of Geology. 
We need, therefore, only mention that the Carboniferous rocks of 
Acadia have yielded the first indications of reptiles of that age ; and 
VOL. V. 2M 
