82 LABRADOR 



dition or "exhibition," as the fishermen with unconscious 

 humour and truth called it, was an amateur botanist, an- 

 other an ornithologist, a third a prospector, a fourth a 

 geologist, and the others enthusiastic hunters. The writer 

 was busied with the geology of the coast, and most of the 

 observations noted in the following pages refer to results 

 obtained during that season. 1 



To know Labrador is to know its geology. The visitor 

 to the northeast coast, were he to go thither to study thor- 

 oughly its climate, its scenery, its botany or zoology, its 

 peoples or few industries, must come upon the final ques- 

 tion concerning all of these: whence came they? When 

 fully answered, he shall have been told the story of the phys- 

 ical growth of the peninsula. Each bird, beast, or man; 

 each moor, tundra, ragged reef, swelling granite dome or 

 fretted mountain-ridge on all the thousand miles of shore, 

 forms a link in the chain that binds the present with the 

 inconceivably distant past of the earth. And seldom else- 

 where is the explorer's mind so forced to the thought of an 

 ancient evolution. The great rocky headlands, looming 

 first out of the fog; the deep, quiet fiord or island-labyrinth 

 receiving the stranger vessel as she runs in from the open 

 sea ; the vast, moss-coloured landscapes on the wilderness of 

 hills ; the stately train of icebergs or the yet mightier ocean- 

 current that bears them southward, these first views, 

 startling in their savageness, charming in their mantle of 

 colour, astonishing in their extent, always of enthralling 

 interest as the elements of a new kind of world, can never 



1 A technical report on the geology appears in the Bulletins of the 

 Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, Vol. 38, 

 p. 205, 1902. 



