NATURE OF THE COAST. 65 



I have visited nearly all the important harbors from Natashquan to 

 Blanc Sablon, and find the same general appearance in the surface 

 geology, and a similar rocky contour in every place thus visited. 

 Bold masses of rock rear themselves as hills from five to seven 

 hundred feet in height ; except the three Bradore hills, which 

 are here called "the mountains," and attain the height, as marked 

 upon the charts, of 1264 feet for the highest, and 11 35 for the 

 second, while the third is of nearly the same size as the second. 

 It is rare that the coast line itself presents, anywhere near the water, 

 a spot large enough upon which to build a house and have the 

 foundations rest upon an upraised seabeach, or any kind of earth. 

 Some of the houses are built on part rock and part earthy patches, 

 while the majority are built directly upon a rocky layer which some- 

 times appears within a few inches of the surface. 



The rocks here present the same general character of coarse 

 granite or gneiss, that is formed chiefly of feldspar in great excess. 

 Occasionally, especially the farther down the coast one goes, the 

 mica is in excess, and several localities give an abundance of good 

 sheet mica that might almost be worked with profit were it not for 

 the distance that it must be transported over land, or rather over 

 rocks. The rock is for the most part syenitic gneiss ; that is, 

 hornblende takes the place of mica, and the feldspar, which is usually 

 orthoclase, as far as I was able to ascertain, is of both white and 

 flesh-colored varieties. The hornblende is of a greenish-black color, 

 and often present in large crystals, but so embedded in the mass of 

 surrounding rock, as, with the fact of its extreme brittleness, to 

 render it impossible or nearly so to extract them. I did not visit 

 the Bradore hills, but they are said to be of gneiss of this same 

 general character. Quartz does not seem to be abundant here. 

 I have several times had an elderly resident of the coast speak to 

 me of a "vein of marble" running through the rock not far from 

 his house, but upon examination had it proven, as I had previously 

 anticipated it to be, a vein of quite poor quartz. It is not my 

 purpose, however, to give here a general dissertation upon the 



