168 THE ICE AGE IN CANADA. 



over the surface, tearing up the outcrops of the beds, and 

 mingling their fragments in a rude and unsorted mass. 



Besides the untravelled fragments, the drift always 

 contains boulders derived from distant localities, to which 

 in many cases we can trace them ; and I may mention a 

 few instances of this to show how extensive has been this 

 transport of detritus. In the low country of Cumberland 

 there are few boulders, but of the few that appear some 

 belong to the hard rocks of the Cobequid hills to the 

 southward ; others may have been derived from the 

 somewhat similar hills of New Brunswick. On the 

 summits of the Cobequid hills and their northern slopes, 

 we find angular fragments of the sandstones of the plain 

 below, not only drifted from their original sites, but 

 elevated several hundreds of feet above them. To the 

 southward and eastward of the Cobequids, throughout 

 Colchester, Northern Hants, and Pictou, fraorments from 

 these hills, usually much rounded, are the most abundant 

 travelled boulders, showing that there has been great 

 driftage from this elevated tract. Near the town of 

 Pictou, where a thick bed of a sandy boulder-deposit 

 occurs, this is filled with large masses of sandstone 

 derived from the outcrops of the beds on higher ground to 

 the north ; but with these are groups of travelled stones 

 often in the lower part of the mass. Near the steam 

 ferry wharf, in the town of Pictou, I observed one such 

 group, consisting of the following, all large boulders and 

 lying close together — two of red syenite, six of gray 

 granite, one of compact gray felsite, one of hard con- 

 glomerate, two of hard grit. The two last were probably 

 Lower Carboniferous, the others derived from the older 

 crystalline rocks. All may have been drifted by one berg 

 or ice-floe from the flanks of the Cobequid range of hills. 



