114 LABRADOR 
no case can any one of these mantles furnish other than 
small patches on the old Basement. For millions of years 
the Labrador has been above the sea and has suffered the 
steady, patient onslaught of frost and rain and the delving 
of brooks and rivers — forces that, with the cumulative 
power of the ages, have laid bare, throughout the Labrador, 
the foundation of the world. 
Thus it has come about that the most ancient of forma- 
tions now lies in contact with the youngest that go to make 
up the geological record, the loose deposits of the geological 
“vesterday’’ and “to-day.” The “yesterday” is the Gla- 
cial Period; the “to-day” is the post-Glacial ‘“ Recent” 
Period. What remains of our brief account of Labrador’s 
scenic evolution has to do with these short but exceedingly 
important epochs. 
At the beginning of the Glacial Period the Labrador Pen- 
insula had essentially the main topographic features of the 
present time. Through the working of climatic causes whose 
relative efficiency is in lively discussion among geologists, 
a regional ice-cap many times greater than the well-known 
ice-field of Greenland gradually accumulated in north- 
eastern America. What seems to have been the region of 
greatest thickening in the ice-sheet was located on the height 
of land between James Bay and the St. Lawrence River. 
Thence the ice slowly flowed in all directions -— to north, 
east, south, and west — outward into the Atlantic off the 
Labrador, the maritime provinces and New England, 
ploughing the sea-floor as it moved; outward into Hudson 
Strait and across Hudson Bay, apparently filling that broad 
basin completely; outward across the Great Lakes, as far 
as the belt of moraines stretching from New York City 
