HISTORICAL NOTICES. 15 



glacier supposed could have no such cliffs from which to 

 collect ; and it must have carried boulders for hundreds 

 of miles, and left them on points as high as those they 

 were taken from. On the Montreal Mountain, at a 

 height of 600 feet above the sea, are huge boulders of 

 gneiss from the Laurentide hills, which must have been 

 carried 50 to 100 miles from points of scarcely greater 

 elevation, and over a valley in which the striae are in a 

 direction nearly at right angles with that of the probable 

 driftage of the boulders. Quite as striking examples 

 occur in many parts of this country.* It is also to be 

 observed that boulders, often of large size, occur scattered 

 through the marine stratified clays and sands containing 

 sea-shells ; and whatever views may be entertained as to 

 other boulders, it cannot be denied that these have been 

 borne by floating ice. Nor is it true, as has been often 

 affirmed, that the boulder-clay is destitute of marine 

 fossils. At Murray Bay, Riviere du Loup and St. Nicholas, 

 on the St. Lawrence, and also at Cape Elizabeth, near 

 Portland, there are tough stony clays of the nature of true 

 " till," and in the lower part of the drift, which contain 

 numerous marine shells of the usual pleistocene species. 



" 4. The pleistocene deposits of Canada, in their fossil 

 remains and general character, indicate a gradual eleva- 

 tion from a state of depression, which, on the evidence of 

 fossils, must have extended to at least 500 feet, and on 

 that of far-travelled boulders, to nearly ten times that 

 amount, while there is nothing but the boulder-clay to 

 represent the previous subsidence, and nothing whatever 



* The same fact, and to heights still greater, has been shown by 

 Ells and others to hold of the hills of the Eastern Townships of Canada, 

 and by Chalmers in Eastern Quebec and in New Brunswick. 



