142 THE ICE AGE IN CANADA. 



rents would be allowed to cleave more closely to the coast, 

 and the inhabitants of the Acadian bay would gradually 

 become isolated, while the northern animals of Labrador 

 would work their way southward.* 



Various modern indications point to the same conclu- 

 sions. Verrill has described little colonies of southern 

 species still surviving on the coast of Maine. There are 

 also dead shells of these species in mud banks, in places 

 where they are now extinct. He also states that the remains 

 in shell-heaps left by the Indians indicate that even within 

 the period of their occupancy some of these species 

 existed in places where they are not now found. Willis has 

 catalogued some of these species from the deep bays and 

 inlets on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, and has shown 

 that some of them still exist on the Sable island banks.f 



Whiteaves finds in the Bradelle and Orphan bank 

 littoral species remote from the present shores, and 

 indicating a time when these banks were islands, which 

 have been submerged by subsidence, aided no doubt by 

 the action of the waves. 



It would thus appear that the colonization of the 

 Acadian bay with southern forms belongs to the modern 

 period, but that it has already passed its culmination, 

 and the recent subsidence of the coast has, no doubt, 

 limited the range of these animals, and is probably still 

 favouring the gradual inroads of the Arctic fauna from 

 the north, which, should this subsidence go on, will creep 

 slowly back to re-occupy the ground which it once held 

 in the Pleistocene time. 



* Since my address of 1874, Ganong has further illustrated this 

 subject in the Transactions of the Natural History Society of New- 

 Brunswick, and of the Royal Society of Canada. 



t Acadian Geology, p. 37. 



