118 LABRADOR 
half a continent, scours and grooves its rock-floor, removes 
loose rubbish, and attacks the solid rock, which slowly yet 
surely wastes under the heavy, creeping stream. In like 
manner, too, a moving ice-stream is freighted with “drift,” 
the débris of the wearing floor, and, finally, that débris 1s 
deposited downstream where the glacier current comes to 
an end. Alluvium is the “drift”? material of the river’s 
load; glacial “drift”? is the alluvium of an ice-stream. 
The alluvial deposits of the river in terrace, flood-plain, or 
delta are the “moraines”’ of the glacier. 
If a well-established, mature river should, through a 
change of climate, become dried up or greatly shrunken in 
volume, its scoured, boulder-strewn gorge, its terrace sands 
and clays and its delta would remain to tell the story of 
that river’s former activity as clearly as if the rushing waters 
had never ceased to flow. Such climatic changes have 
actually occurred in various parts of the world, so that, 
even in that respect, water-streams and ice-streams hold 
their analogy. 
All of these three principal activities of glaciers are 
memorialized with wonderful clearness on the Labrador. 
However, as might be expected from the fact that the pen- 
insula was the central region of dispersal for the ice-cap, 
the main effect of glaciation on the coast has been to abrade 
the bed-rock and to carry away the loose product of the 
grinding to the ice-margin which lay far out on the bed of 
the Atlantic. The scenery, no less than the conditions 
ruling plant, animal, and human life on the coast, has been 
powerfully affected by this erosive work of the vanished 
elacier. To that phase of the glacial geology of Labrador 
the explorer’s attention is inevitably turned. 
