114 LABRADOR 



no case can any one of these mantles furnish other than 

 small patches on the old 3asement. For millions of years 

 the Labrador has been above the sea and has suffered the 

 steady, patient onslaught of frost and rain and the delving 

 of brooks and rivers forces that, with the cumulative 

 power of the ages, have laid bare, throughout the Labrador, 

 the foundation of the world. 



Thus it has come about that the most ancient of forma- 

 tions now lies in contact with the youngest that go to make 

 up the geological record, the loose deposits of the geological 

 "yesterday" and "to-day." The "yesterday" is the Gla- 

 cial Period; the "to-day" is the post-Glacial "Recent" 

 Period. What remains of our brief account of Labrador's 

 scenic evolution has to do with these short but exceedingly 

 important epochs. 



At the beginning of the Glacial Period the Labrador Pen- 

 insula had essentially the main topographic features of the 

 present time. Through the working of climatic causes whose 

 relative efficiency is in lively discussion among geologists, 

 a regional ice-cap many times greater than the well-known 

 ice-field of Greenland gradually accumulated in north- 

 eastern America. What seems to have been the region of 

 greatest thickening in the ice-sheet was located on the height 

 of land between James Bay and the St. Lawrence River. 

 Thence the ice slowly flowed in all directions to north, 

 east, south, and west outward into the Atlantic off the 

 Labrador, the maritime provinces and New England, 

 ploughing the sea-floor as it moved ; outward into Hudson 

 Strait and across Hudson Bay, apparently filling that broad 

 basin completely; outward across the Great Lakes, as far 

 as the belt of moraines stretching from New York City 



