130 LABRADOR 
It has been said that the ice-cap left but little of its drift 
on the surface of the Labrador plateau. The same state- 
ment is true of the contemporaneous glacial action on New- 
foundland. Yet in both lands enough “drifted”? boulders 
were dropped on the smoothed and scoured bed-rock so 
that the whole floor of the glacier was pretty thickly 
peppered over with these products of ice-erosion. Noth- 
ing can be more evident on the low, bare, treeless hillsides 
facing the open Atlantic on Newfoundland or the Labrador 
than the absence of such boulders. Below the level of 
500 feet above sea on the eastern shore of the island, and 
below the 250-foot contour on the Labrador, the vast ma- 
jority of the boulders have been swept from the slopes where 
the ice dropped them. Only a few of the very largest, too 
ponderous to be moved even by the superb onslaught of 
the North Atlantic ‘seas,’ remain in or near their former 
positions. The rest are gone to the many boulder and gravel 
beaches left stranded, as it were, in the valleys of the 
emerging land, or at the present moment are being ground 
in the mill of the surf whither they have been dragged dur- 
ing the uplift. Hundreds of square miles of ice-worn hills 
of naked rock have been thus washed clean of glacial 
débris. Compare the two views of Bear Island. 
With special intensity those cleared surfaces are feeling 
Nature’s ceaseless attack. Exposed as they are to the open 
sky in a rigorous climate, the rocks of the wave-washed 
zone are being rent and shattered by the frost, which uses 
the rain-water of the present, has used the rains and the 
spray fling of former times, to split the rocks. Here and 
there the surface is clasped in the close embrace of many- 
hued lichens or covered by thicker growths of almost 
