46 IMPERFECTION OF THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD 



actual quarrying operations in such a way that they soon 

 obtained the richest Devonian plant collections ever known. 

 I think I may truly say that these young and enthusiastic 

 explorers worked the St. John plant-beds in a manner pre- 

 viously unexampled in the world. Their researches were not 

 only thus rewarded, but incidentally they discovered the first 

 known Devonian insects, which could not have been found 

 by a less painstaking process, and one of them discovered 

 what I believe to be the oldest known land shell. Still more, 

 their studies led to the separation from the Devonian beds of 

 the Underlying Cambrian slates, previously confounded with 

 them ; and this, followed up by the able and earnest work of 

 Mr. Matthew, has carried back our knowledge of the older 

 rocks in Canada several stages, or as far as the earliest 

 Cambrian previously known in Europe, but not before fully 

 recognised in America, and has discovered in these old rocks 

 the precursors of many forms of life not previously traced so 

 far back. 



The moral of these statements of fact is that the imper- 

 fections of the record will yield only to patient and painstaking 

 work, and that much is in the power of local amateurs. I 

 would enforce this last statement by a reference to a little 

 research, in which I have happened to take part at a summer 

 resort on the Lower St. Lawrence, at which I have from time 

 to time spent a few restful vacation weeks. Little Metis is on 

 the Quebec Group of Sir William Logan, that peculiar local 

 representative of the lower part of the Cambro-Silurian and 

 Upper Cambrian formations which stretches along the south 

 side of the St. Lawrence all the way from Quebec to Cape 

 Rosier, near Gaspe", a distance of five hundred miles. This 

 great series of rocks is a jumble of deposits belonging at that 

 early time to the marginal area of what is now the American 

 continent, and indicating the action not merely of ordinary 

 causes of aqueous deposit, but of violent volcanic ejections, 



