222 (Geology, ^c. of Malbay L. C. 



They are clearly the work of the present river; but 

 when its bottom and surface have been at very different 

 levels from the present. The country to the north west, 

 from whence the materials forming these hills have been 

 drawn, is not universally, as liayden, in his spirited, use- 

 ful, but ill-digested work supposes, naked, and soil-less 

 from the devastations of a debacle, but abounds in alluvial 

 plains of immense extent, and some so fertile, as to have 

 induced (he Jesuits to plant gardens and vineyards there, 

 as on the low rich banks of the Lake St. John, of the 

 Saguenay River, Lake Tematscaming, and in the rear of 

 the mountains of Malbay and St. Paul, to the last of which 

 situations, the Canadian peasantry, sluggish and unobser- 

 vant as they are, were induced to remove. The length 

 and severity of the winter, however, and the solitariness 

 of these wild regions, have compelled them to return to 

 their friends around Quebec. 



The great primitive floods, appear to have been in some 

 measure partial ; their force and direction being modified 

 by the nature of the ground over which they flowed. 

 Thus, much of the northwest is a vast assemblage of de- 

 bris, without soil, and without vegetation, as on the River 

 des Francois, the coast of Labrador, and the barrens of 

 Hearne. It is singular that among the incalculable quanti- 

 ties of detached rocks which load the district of Malbay, 

 1 met with only two specimens of the clay slate of Cam- 

 ourasca, on the opposite side of the St. Lawrence; and a 

 similar number in the Eboulemenfs, while in Upper Canada 

 the jasper conglomerate of the Northwest of Lake Huron 

 overspreads all the high grounds of that large body of wa- 

 ter. 



The epidotic Greenstones, the greenstone porphyries 

 and other peculiar rocks of the same lake, are plentiful, as 

 rolled masses in Lake Erie, at the foot of Lake Superior, 

 the rapids of Hawksbury on the river Ottawa, an extent of 

 country exceeding 1000 square miles. The trap of Mon- 

 treal is found loose, on the shores of Lakes Francis and 

 Champlain, localities to which the existing rivers could not 

 have conveyed them, as their current observes the oppo- 

 site direction. JOHN I. BIGSBY. M. D. 



