RESULTS OF THE EXPEDITION 167 



real feature during this journey. I remember being much inter- 

 ested in the problem of how the island of Anticosti, with its per- 

 fectly undisturbed strata, could have obtained its salience. The 

 same question was asked me by the other islands and capes of 

 the Gulf district. I came then to the hypothesis that the whole 

 region had been recently much higher than at present, and had 

 remained so long enough for broad valleys to be formed, and 

 that these islands were the higher part of the divides between 

 them. I recall trying from the charts to construct a plan of the 

 ancient drainage, by extending the main St. Lawrence valley 

 out to the sea, platting in tributary vales. In this scheme the 

 peculiar channel of the Strait of Canso puzzled me much ; I had 

 to account for it, as for certain other features which did not 

 accord with the hypothesis, by the supposition that glacial 

 action had done much to change the shape of the stream to- 

 pography formed before the last ice came. These speculations, 

 fairly true, show that for a youth of twenty, in that state of 

 geology, I reacted well on the things which came before me. / 

 I found the fossils of Anticosti very fascinating; some of 

 them showed themselves at a glance to be closely related to 

 those of the Cincinnati horizon with which I was familiar, yet 

 there were many forms entirely new to me, and some with 

 which I was familiar had a changed aspect. Those gigantic 

 fossil sponges found in the deposits at about the level of the 

 vitric shale at Brating Point, forming fluted columns sometimes 

 eight inches in diameter and six or eight feet in length, puzzled 

 me much. Hyatt, even then concerned with the nautiloid 

 cephalopods, judged them to be akin to the lower known forms 

 of this group, though he afterwards abandoned that view, even 

 before James Hall determined their affinities. These archi- 

 tecturally noble structures were then deemed peculiar to this 

 field; but about fifteen years thereafter I found them in an- 

 other specific form of somewhat lesser size in Nelson County, 

 Kentucky, at about the same horizon. Certain of the peculiari- 

 ties of the Anticosti species of fossils as compared with those 



