56 /. B. TYRRELL 



Ocean This part of the Cordillera of the West was, in the Glacial 



period, covered by a great confluent glacier-mass. 



In a longer paper, published in the same year in the Trans- 

 actions of the Royal Society of Canada (Vol. 8, Sec. 4, pp. 3-74); 

 he reiterated his belief in this glacier, and gave a map showing 

 its extent from the Yukon Territory down to an irregular Hne 

 south of latitude 49°. 



Last summer my mining duties called me to British Columbia 

 and I traveled by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, stopping off 

 at Prince George, which is on the interior plateau of the province, 

 just south of latitude 54° north, and 80 or 90 miles in a direct 

 line southwest of the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains. 

 Its elevation is 1,862 feet above sea-level. From Prince George 

 I descended the Fraser River, a distance of about 70 miles in a 

 straight line, to Quesnel, which lies at an elevation of 1,570 feet 

 above sea-level, and from there went eastward 50 miles to the old 

 gold-mining district of Cariboo, which is at an elevation of about 

 4,000 feet above sea-level. During this time I was in the middle 

 of the region of which Dr. Dawson writes "that the ice reached a 

 general thickness of 2,000 to 3,000 feet above even the higher 

 tracts of the plateau, while it must have attained a thickness of 

 over 6,000 feet above the main river valleys and other principal 

 depressions of the surface."^ It was therefore natural for me to 

 look for evidence of intense ice action such as may be seen in 

 valleys cutting through or descending from the Coast Range of 

 this western province, but such evidence was conspicuously absent. 



The Fraser River flows in a direction a little east of south in 

 the bottom of a great wide valley, with high rugged mountains 

 in the distance both to the east and west, this valley being simply 

 the lowest part of the great interior plateau of British Columbia. 



On the eastern side of this valley or plateau, arid on the west- 

 ern slopes of the mountains which define its eastern rim, is the 

 Cariboo district in which marvelously rich placer mines were 

 discovered and worked in the early sixties of last century. The 

 rocks composing the mountains are pre-Cambrian or Cambrian 

 sericitic and chloritic schists. Deep, narrow valleys carry streams 

 ^Am. GeoL, September, 1890, p. 155. 



