164 THE ICE AGE IN CANADA. 



Belle-Isle, to the bay of Fundy; and that heavy ice 

 carried by this current might, at the time of greatest 

 depression, ground on Prince Edward Island, or be carried 

 across it to the southward. If the Laurentian boulders 

 came in this way, their source is probably 400 miles distant 

 in the strait of Belle Isle. On the north shore of Prince 

 Edward Island, except where occupied by sand dunes, the 

 beach shows great numbers of pebbles and small boulders 

 of Laurentian rocks. These are said by the inhabitants 

 to be cast up by the sea or pushed up by the ice in spring. 

 Whether they are now being drifted by ice direct from 

 the Labrador coast, or are old drift being washed up from 

 the bottom of the Gulf, which, north of the island, is 

 very shallow, does not appear. They are all much rounded 

 by the waves, differing in this respect from the majority 

 of the boulders found inland. 



The older boulder-clay of Prince Edward Island, with 

 native boulders, must have been produced under circum- 

 stances of powerful ice-action, in which comparatively 

 little transport of material from a distance occurred. If 

 we attribute this to a glacier, then, as Prince Edward 

 Island is merely a slightly raised portion of the bottom of 

 the gulf of St. Lawrence, this can have been no other 

 than a gigantic mass of ice filling the whole basin of the 

 gulf, and without any slope to give it movement except 

 toward the centre of this great though shallow depression. 

 On the other hand, if we attribute the boulder-clay to 

 floating ice, it must have been produced at a time when 

 numerous heavy bergs were disengaged from what of 

 Labrador was above water, and when this was too 

 thoroughly enveloped in snow and ice to afford many 

 travelled stones. Farther, that this boulder-clay is a 



