229 BULLETIN: MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 
ragged outlier of the crystallines from which the sedimentary cover has 
been swept by denudation. The island has been called by the “ New- 
foundland Pilot” “the most remarkable and unmistakable land on the 
Labrador coast.” Nothing could exceed the contrast between its char- 
acter and that of the Mugford massifs. The light gray precipitous 
two-thousand-foot peaks of the one oppose the black, tabular, greatly 
dissected piles of the other. 
At Cape Mugford, which forms a nearly vertical sea-cliff about two 
thousand feet in height, we were struck with the highly ferruginous 
character of the sediments, broad bands of variously tinted iron-rust 
enriching and enlivening the color effects in a marked degree. Numerous 
waterfalls and extensive banks of snow lent welcome relief to the dark 
cliffs, the black recesses of huge sea-chasms, and the savage gorge-like 
inlets that opened one after another as our schooner slowly forged 
through the “tide” around the cape. 
Fine as this scenery was, still greater magnificence awaited us as we 
came face to face with the Bishop’s Mitre toward the close of a memor- 
able day of sailing. Seen from the northeast, the mountain, estimated 
to be considerably more than three thousand feet in height, displays a 
symmetry which is most remarkable in view of the fact that the pres- 
ent profiles are everywhere the result of erosion. As the name im- 
plies, there are two peaked summits. They are separated by a sharp 
notch about five hundred feet in depth. This breach is but the upper- 
most part of a gigantic ravine that cleaves the mountain to its base at 
the shore more than two miles from the notch. Occupying the bottom of 
the ravine an uninterrupted snow-bank still marked, in the month of 
August, the line of symmetry of the whole mountain. From either peak 
of the Mitre a rugged razor-back ridge descends, each gradually diverg- 
ing from the other across the widening intervening trench. With essen- 
tially equivalent transverse and longitudinal profiles, the two spurs 
further match as each terminates at an elevation of about one thousand 
feet, in a bold rock-tower. Each tower rises eight hundred feet or there- 
abouts above the ridge-crest and, on the east, drops suddenly the full 
eighteen hundred feet into the sea. The matching of the right and left 
halves of the mountain does not stop with the form. Each of the sen- 
tinel towers is composed above of black Mugford sediments reposing on 
five hundred feet of the light gray gneissic complex. The architectural 
quality of these great buttresses and of the Mitre itself is greatly en- 
hanced when a fresh fall of snow brings out the nearly horizontal structure 
1 Newfoundland and Labrador Pilot (ed. 8, Hydrog. Office, London, 1897, p. 680). 
