GEOLOGY AND SCENERY OF NORTHEAST COAST 83 
fail to rouse a very ardour for exploration. In England, 
France, or Germany, the peoples, the culture, cities, rail- 
roads, institutions, must claim the traveller first, and the 
primitive, the soil, the ground of Europe, only second. 
In most of Labrador, Nature, supreme in her loneliness, 
ealls first, last, and always. 
Like every science, earth-science is the result of restless, 
eternal questioning, much of it answered, infinitely more 
unanswered. He thinks especially in questions who thinks 
at all in Labrador geology; it forms a mass of problems for 
the most part unsolved. Yet some of these have such 
importance that the mere statement of them has value, and 
when further exploration has given the solutions, it will be 
found that the scientific study of Labrador will have brought 
a rich store to man’s knowledge of the whole earth. Rather, 
therefore, to erect finger-posts pointing the way to wide 
fields of research than to indicate that much is known of 
the Labrador coast, the pages of this chapter have been 
written. 
So far geologists and geographers have accomplished 
nothing more than a rapid reconnaissance of the coast. 
That stage of exploration has a borrowed name, and in some 
respects explorers are compelled to regard the new land as 
an enemy — to be conquered at some cost. More or less 
“roughing it,” almost always a degree of hard though repay- 
ing toil, the bite of the sun or the bite of the polar wind — 
all form “ part of the game,” a kind of war-game. An expe- 
dition to the Labrador has assuredly to meet with such 
troubles and a few special ones besides. In early summer a 
sailing craft must meet with the wide fields of pan-ice which 
unite with the “Labrador” ocean-current and prevalent 
