116 LABRADOR 



attaches to a regional glacier will surely and amply repay 

 the explorer who heads his steamer for Frobisher Bay. 

 The Grinnell Glacier lies only a long half-day's journey 

 by steamer from Cape Chidley ; in a sense it is at the very 

 door of civilization, yet it is far less known than the ice of 

 northern Greenland or the distant glaciers of Alaska. 



Whether or not the north land bears any remnant of the 

 ice which once overwhelmed Labrador, the recency of the 

 glacial retreat from the peninsula is most strikingly evident. 

 This is especially true on the northeast coast, where the gla- 

 cialist, no less than the worker in bed-rock, is blessed with 

 that negative virtue of the earth's surface, the absence of a 

 forest-cover. He who runs may read the glacial records 

 from one end of the coastal belt to the other. 



To gain a vital idea of ice-work even on the Greenland 

 scale or the Antarctic scale, one needs not the training of a 

 professional glacialist. A first approach to the understand- 

 ing of glaciers may be profitably made in the recognition 

 of their analogy with rivers. Upstream, a river scours its 

 channel, batters, grooves, and wears away the solid rock, 

 so deepening its bed and in time excavating a valley of a 

 size appropriate to the stream. In its lower course on 

 flood-plain or delta, the river lays down the rock-fragments 

 worn out of the rocky channel. Throughout the length 

 of the river, increasingly, this debris, in the form of gravel, 

 sand, or mud, is moving deltawards. A water-stream has 

 thus three main functions to scour, to carry the scoured 

 rubbish down the valley, and then to deposit that same 

 rubbish in lake or sea or other basin, where the stream's 

 velocity is finally checked. In like manner the gliding ice- 

 stream, whether flanked by valley-walls or blanketing 



