GEOLOGY AND SCENERY OF NORTHEAST COAST 85 
strenuous outdoor work. If he be interested in bed-rock 
geology, he finds conditions comparable to those that 
favour observation in “ The Paradise of geologists,” the arid 
or subarid plateaus of the western United States. Here as 
there the climate forbids the growth of the heavy forest- 
cap which covers so much of the geological record in arable 
lands, and in Labrador the intense glaciation of the last 
Glacial epoch has left remarkably little rock-rubbish or 
“drift’’ on the surface of the well-scoured and still rela- 
tively unweathered, fresh rock. The geologist leaves the 
coast, therefore, well content if he has had time to make 
anything like an extended reconnaissance of the enemy; 
there remains as well the stimulus to hope for a future 
campaign. 
Labrador is the land of charm, whether it be among the 
low, moss-covered islands of the south or on the superb 
mountains of the north. But this charm hitherto de- 
scribed in terms of impressions derived from visits to what 
is really southern Labrador is a hundred fold greater in the 
region north of Cape Mugford. 
Yet throughout the whole stretch from Belle Isle to 
Hudson Strait the scenery is to be related, sooner or later, 
to one great group of geological formations, all rocks of 
the remotest antiquity; and perhaps no more fitting 
introduction to the geology and geography of the coast 
is to be found than to describe the extensive fundamental 
terrane. It belongs for the most part to the Archean series, 
offering like the Archean rocks of the world, problems of 
extreme difficulty. Able and highly trained geologists, 
specialists in the Archean, during the past thirty years have 
solved some of these problems, but it is still fair to call this 
