128 LABRADOR 



if the truth be recognized that all about the North Atlantic 

 the same upward movement of the land has taken place. 

 The shores of Maine, Quebec, Scotland, Scandinavia, and 

 Finland are regions favoured by those who love the form 

 and colour contrasts of the many-tinted sea with the massive, 

 bold, or savage rocks still bearing marks of a late submerg- 

 ence. On a larger scale and, in general, with much greater 

 vividness than elsewhere in North America at least, the 

 explanation of this peculiar scenery can be told and illus- 

 trated on the Labrador, where, therefore, the beauty of 

 such a shore, becoming a type of all, can be at once best 

 appreciated and understood. 



A visit to the newest dry land of Labrador has yet greater 

 value in giving one faith in the reality of the giant geo- 

 logical forces. Throughout a human lifetime the earth 

 seems stable; the human records of a thousand years 

 seem to establish the same belief. It needs some such 

 object-lesson as the emerged coastal zone of Labrador to 

 show us finally that those "first impressions" are wrong, 

 that the Greek philosophers were right, though they knew 

 not the name of geology, in claiming for the world an " eter- 

 nal flux of things," The lesson speaks tellingly of the real 

 instability of the sea-level, of massive, regional uplifts of 

 the land, and of the growth of continents. On other 

 grounds, for example, it is believed that the long coastal 

 plain underlying the Atlantic States from New Jersey 

 to Florida was once part of the bed of the ocean, but the 

 belief founded on local discoveries at last reaches its full 

 strength and overlaps actual knowledge when it can be 

 shown beyond doubt or cavil that the sea-bottom elsewhere 

 has been warped up to form new land. With unmistakable 



