118 LABRADOR 



half a continent, scours and grooves its rock-floor, removes 

 loose rubbish, and attacks the solid rock, which slowly yet 

 surely wastes under the heavy, creeping stream. In like 

 manner, too, a moving ice-stream is freighted with "drift," 

 the debris of the wearing floor, and, finally, that debris is 

 deposited downstream where the glacier current comes to 

 an end. Alluvium is the "drift" material of the river's 

 load; glacial "drift" is the alluvium of an ice-stream. 

 The alluvial deposits of the river in terrace, flood-plain, or 

 delta are the "moraines" of the glacier. 



If a well-established, mature river should, through a 

 change of climate, become dried up or greatly shrunken in 

 volume, its scoured, boulder-strewn gorge, its terrace sands 

 and clays and its delta would remain to tell the story of 

 that river's former activity as clearly as if the rushing waters 

 had never ceased to flow. Such climatic changes have 

 actually occurred in various parts of the world, so that, 

 even in that respect, water-streams and ice-streams hold 

 their analogy. 



All of these three principal activities of glaciers are 

 memorialized with wonderful clearness on the Labrador. 

 However, as might be expected from the fact that the pen- 

 insula was the central region of dispersal for the ice-cap, 

 the main effect of glaciation on the coast has been to abrade 

 the bed-rock and to carry away the loose product of the 

 grinding to the ice-margin which lay far out on the bed of 

 the Atlantic. The scenery, no less than the conditions 

 ruling plant, animal, and human life on the coast, has been 

 powerfully affected by this erosive work of the vanished 

 glacier. To that phase of the glacial geology of Labrador 

 the explorer's attention is inevitably turned. 



