126 LAKE SUPERIOR. 



the Professor, and the poor fellows were immediately attended to. 

 They were dreadfully burnt and torn about the face, and were moan- 

 ing with pain, and still more at the thoughts of losing their eyes, and 

 thus their means of support. The doctors shook their heads at first, 

 but afterwards, after proper washing, &c., their case looked better. 

 They were taken on board to be carried to the hospital at Penetan- 

 guishene, and we had the satisfaction on landing them there of believ- 

 ing that they would come out with an eye apiece, at the worst. 



This mine belongs to the Montreal Company, and the little settle- 

 ment has a thriving look. The works that we saw were mostly open 

 trenches, displaying a few feet of top-soil, consisting of unstratified 

 drift, clay with scratched pebbles and bowlders. The metalliferous 

 rock, which is sienite and metamorphic talc-schist, with veins -of 

 quartz, is also polished and scratched. The ore consists of various 

 sulphurets of copper, particularly the yellow. At St. Joseph's, where 

 we stopped to wood, the Captain, (a very intelligent man, abounding 

 in information concerning the country,) took us to see a rock which 

 he considered a great curiosity. It proved to be a large bowlder of 

 the most beautiful conglomerate, presenting a great variety of bril- 

 liant colors ; agates, jasper, porphyry, trap, &c., all polished down to 

 an even surface. Other bowlders of the same kind were lying about 

 near the beach. The rock in place is Trenton limestone, and full 

 of the organic remains peculiar to that deposit. We observed great 

 numbers of bowlders on all the islands we passed in Lake Huron. 



There is a little settlement on this end of the island, which the 

 captain called his, as the land belongs to him. He bought seven 

 hundred acres, (no doubt of our friend the Major and his co-tenant,) 

 at the rate of twenty cents an acre, for land said to be fertile, and 

 certainly supporting a fine growth of hard-wood trees. 



In the evening the Professor made the following remarks on occa- 

 sion of the bowlder : 



" This bowlder may be considered as an epitome of all the rocks we have 

 seen. A complete examination of it would occupy a geologist many months. 

 This conglomerate is associated with the oldest stratified formations, and must 

 have been formed in the same epoch with them. Its component parts give 

 us some insight into its age. It contains no fragment of fossiUferous rock ; 

 thus the pebbles of which it is composed must have been broken off, rolled 



