DALY: PHYSIOGRAPHY OF ACADIA. 83 
duced to a lowland throughout a whole physiographic province. We 
expect, therefore, that if the upland facet of the Southern Plateau be 
of the nature of a true peneplain, it must have once extended far and 
wide over Acadia. It need not now be continuous, for the warping, 
which we believe has occurred, may be expected to have revived the old 
rivers of the former cycle, and to have developed new subsequent 
drainage in the present cycle; that, therefore, belts of lowland may be 
looked for wherever weak rocks appear. This deduction is realized in 
the facts. Where, for example, the older, harder Paleeozoics appear out- 
side of the Southern Plateau, there uplands and fragments of the peue- 
plain are found to occur, and it is the soft Carboniferous and Triassic 
sediments that underlie the extensive lowlands. In fact, the various 
topographic divisions of Acadia from the Southern Plateau to Gaspé are 
perhaps best described in terms of this facet. The evidences for this 
statement will be more clear after a brief recital of the facts relating to 
each of the divisions. Since I have had the opportunity of making 
but one excursion and that by railway, across Cape Breton Island, and 
since the amount of information regarding the recent geological history 
of that island is scanty, I shall not attempt to speak of it in detail. 
From the nature of its terranes and from its geographical position, it 
ought to include part of the peneplain ; and, indeed, from the descrip- 
tions of Campbell! and Fletcher (’84, p. 77), it would seem that the facet 
is excellently represented in the northern half of the island. 
THe Copequip PLateav. — The Cobequid mountain belt runs nearly 
due east and west along a major axis about seventy-five miles long ; 
its average and fairly constant width is from nine to ten miles. The 
opinion of the Canadian Survey officers has varied with respect to 
the age of the rocks composing these old mountains. According to 
the map issued by the Selwyn survey in 1886, they are pre-Cambrian, 
but Ells (97, p. 119) has recently expressed the conclusion that 
they “may with propriety be regarded as more recent than the pre- 
Cambrian,” and this is true of the granite intrusions at least, which are 
late Devonian or post-Devonian. In any case, however, we know that 
the range is composed of highly crystalline, complexly folded series of 
rocks that are now bounded by a rolling plateau-top from eight hun- 
dred to one thousand feet above the sea, some “ peaks” reaching eleven 
hundred feet in altitude (Chalmers, ’95, p. 9). The general surface 
of this plateau now stands at an elevation which correlates it well with 
the peneplain of the Southern Plateau. The extension of the latter facet 
1 Dawson, Acadian Geology, 2nd ed., pp. 564, 685. 
