210 Report of the Brown-Harvard Expedition. 



depth of 100 fathoms, it is not deep as fiords go, but the in- 

 terruption of its bottom seaward slope by two rock-sills 

 within the "Narrows" and the existence of a similar shoal 

 outside show this bay to be of the same nature as the typical 

 inlets of Norway, Greenland, or Alaska. The best inter- 

 pretation of such an arrangement of bottom slopes would 

 attribute them and the broad U-shaped cross-section of the 

 fiord to glacial erosion. A corroboration of this view was 

 found in a number of "hanging valleys" which are drained 

 into the bay. It is now the fashion to regard these as in- 

 dicating a power of excavation possessed by valley glaciers 

 which was considered as highly improbable by most geol- 

 ogists only fiVe years ago. One of these side-valleys is 

 "hanging" some 1,200 feet above the bottom of its 

 trunk valley, Nachvak Bay, and at the junction of the two 

 occurs the finest cascade in the region. 



At Nachvak I was able to confirm Dr. Robert Bell in 

 the proof that the glaciers of the ice epoch were only local 

 in its closing stages, and that an overwhelming general gla- 

 ciation of the Torngats, such as occurred in the White, 

 Green, and Adirondack mountains, did not take place in the 

 last glacial epoch. The ice of that period moved seaward 

 from the neve of the interior of Labrador through the trans- 

 verse valleys and passes of this range, and seldom, if ever, 

 submerged the mountains above the 2,100 contour. 



The glacial striae of the coast are scarcely more 

 numerous than the "lunoid furrows" which had been dis- 

 covered there by Professor Packard. Their characteristics 

 led me to a somewhat new interpretation of these markings, 

 which, however, I shall not detail here. They agreed with 

 the strine in showing- that the ice-movements of the last 



