OLD MURRAY BAY 



Times and again the sea covered all this 

 land; times and again the ice invaded it, 

 rose thousands of feet above it — planing, 

 smoothing, rounding whatever lay athwart 

 its flow, hollowing lake-beds, building 

 moraines, transporting myriads of boulders 

 from afar, grinding the clays that filled the 

 Murray valley from side to side ere its river 

 made an end of the task on which the milky 

 Mailloux still is busy. The limestones 

 along the coast were laid down during an 

 early submergence, a later one accounts for 

 some beds of fossils — such a bed lies buried 

 under the railway at the Point. 



But those features which the eye is apt 

 to remark as most singular and arrestive 

 were shaped in a very late chapter of the 

 earth's long record. The St. Lawrence it- 

 self, reckoning in geologic measures of time, 

 is no ancient river. Unbroken land once 

 shutting away the Atlantic from the Con- 

 tinental Sea was rent and sunk to form the 

 channel. The strata dipping to the bold 

 northern shore mark the line of this gigan- 

 tic fault, of which the clififs at Montmorenci 

 and Cap a I'Aigle are fresh memorials. It 

 may well be that the earthquake which 

 began on the dire Shrovetide of 1663 and 

 lasted for seven months was a further sub- 

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