130 LABRADOR 



It has been said that the ice-cap left but little of its drift 

 on the surface of the Labrador plateau. The same state- 

 ment is true of the contemporaneous glacial action on New- 

 foundland. Yet in both lands enough "drifted" boulders 

 were dropped on the smoothed and scoured bed-rock so 

 that the whole floor of the glacier was pretty thickly 

 peppered over with these products of ice-erosion. Noth- 

 ing can be more evident on the low, bare, treeless hillsides 

 facing the open Atlantic on Newfoundland or the Labrador 

 than the absence of such boulders. Below the level of 

 500 feet above sea on the eastern shore of the island, and 

 below the 250-foot contour on the Labrador, the vast ma- 

 jority of the boulders have been swept from the slopes where 

 the ice dropped them. Only a few of the very largest, too 

 ponderous to be moved even by the superb onslaught of 

 the North Atlantic "seas," remain in or near their former 

 positions. The rest are gone to the many boulder and gravel 

 beaches left stranded, as it were, in the valleys of the 

 emerging land, or at the present moment are being ground 

 in the mill of the surf whither they have been dragged dur- 

 ing the uplift. Hundreds of square miles of ice- worn hills 

 of naked rock have been thus washed clean of glacial 

 debris. Compare the two views of Bear Island. 



With special intensity those cleared surfaces are feeling 

 Nature's ceaseless attack. Exposed as they are to the open 

 sky in a rigorous climate, the rocks of the wave-washed 

 zone are being rent and shattered by the frost, which uses 

 the rain-water of the present, has used the rains and the 

 spray fling of former times, to split the rocks. Here and 

 there the surface is clasped in the close embrace of many- 

 hued lichens or covered by thicker growths of almost 



