354 THE GREAT ICE AGE 



But such large speculations might soon carry us far from 

 Belle-Isle, and to bring us back to the American coast and to 

 the domain of common things, we may note that a vast variety 

 of marine life exists in the cold waters of the Arctic current, 

 and that this is one of the reasons of the great and valuable 

 fisheries of Labrador, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, regions 

 in which the sea thus becomes the harvest field of much of the 

 human population. On the Arctic current and its ice also 

 floats to the southward the game of the sealers of St. John and 

 the whalers of Gaspe. 



We may now proceed to connect these statements as to the 

 distribution of icebergs, with the glaciated condition of our 

 continents, with the remarkable fact that the same effects now 

 produced by the ice and the Arctic current in the Strait of 

 Belle-Isle and the deep-current channel off the American coast, 

 are visible all over the North American and European land 

 north of forty degrees of latitude, and that there is evidence 

 that the St. Lawrence valley itself was once a gigantic Belle- 

 Isle, in which thousands of bergs worked perhaps for thou- 

 sands of years, grinding and striating its rocks, cutting out its 

 deeper parts, and heaping up in it quantities 01 northern debris. 

 Out of this fact of the so-called glaciated condition of the sur- 

 face of our continents has, however, arisen one of the great 

 controversies of modern geology. While all admit the action 

 of ice in distributing and arranging the materials which consti- 

 tute the last coating which has been laid upon the surface of 

 our continents, some maintain that land glaciers have done 

 the work, others, that sea-borne ice has been the main agent 

 employed. As in some other controversies, the truth seems to 

 lie between the extremes. Glaciers are slow, inactive, and 

 limited in their sphere. Floating ice is locomotive and far- 

 travelled, extending its action to great distances from its 

 sources. So far, the advantages are in favour of the flotation. 

 But the work which the glacier does is done thoroughly, and, 



