82 LABRADOR 
( ) 
dition or ‘‘exhibition,”’ as the fishermen with unconscious 
humour and truth called it, was an amateur botanist, an- 
other an ornithologist, a third a prospector, a fourth a 
geologist, and the others enthusiastic hunters. The writer 
was busied with the geology of the coast, and most of the 
observations noted in the following pages refer to results 
obtained during that season.’ 
To know Labrador is to know its geology. The visitor 
to the northeast coast, were he to go thither to study thor- 
oughly its climate, its scenery, its botany or zodlogy, its 
peoples or few industries, must come upon the final ques- 
tion concerning all of these: whence came they? When 
fully answered, he shall have been told thestory of the phys- 
ical growth of the peninsula. Each bird, beast, or man; 
each moor, tundra, ragged reef, swelling granite dome or 
fretted mountain-ridge on all the thousand miles of shore, 
forms a link in the chain that binds the present with the 
inconceivably distant past of the earth. And seldom else- 
where is the explorer’s mind so forced to the thought of an 
ancient evolution. The great rocky headlands, looming 
first out of the fog; the deep, quiet fiord or island-labyrinth 
receiving the stranger vessel as she runs in from the open 
sea; the vast, moss-coloured landscapes on the wilderness of 
hills; the stately train of icebergs or the yet mightier ocean- 
current that bears them southward, — these first views, 
startling in their savageness, charming in their mantle of 
colour, astonishing in their extent, always of enthralling 
interest as the elements of a new kind of world, can never 
1 A technical report on the geology appears in the Bulletins of the 
Museum of Comparative Zodlogy at Harvard University, Vol. 38, 
p. 205, 1902. 
