348 J. Milne — Ice and Ice-worh in Neiofoundland, 



hand, I think it would rather have tended to smoothen them down 

 and deposit them in heaped confusion in the valleys, and they would 

 probably, in that case, have been derived from the North-East rather 

 than from the West, as they seem to indicate. Let alone the 

 mechanical forces, which are constantly at work upon a beach, the 

 ordinary processes of disintegration, the result of subaerial conditions 

 must have exercised considerable influence during the ages that 

 have elapsed, whilst the land was rising to its present elevation, and 

 this especially upon such soft rocks as serpentine, of which many of 

 these erratics consist. Such boulders as these seem to point to another 

 origin rather than to that of a sea full of icebergs. 



Further to the north the same circumstances are here and there 

 presented. Sailing up the long straight shore of White Bay, a line of 

 hills, whose topmost heights are fringed with boulders, are seen 

 trending away before you to the northward, until their escarpment 

 which faces the Atlantic grows dim, and is lost to view in the distance. 

 After the red cliffs of Conche (which are almost the only fragment of 

 'Devonian Shale in Newfoundland) have been passed, Kirpon, the 

 most northern settlement in the island, is reached. Boulders are to 

 be found here, and some of them of immense size. 



Western Newfoundland. — After leaving Kirpon, we pass the 

 northern end of the long range of granitic hills, running parallel 

 with the western coast, forming the great backbone of the country, 

 and which give to it, in some respects, a contour not unlike that of 

 Arabia, the slope leading to the eastern coast being flat and long, 

 whilst that to the west is short and steep. 



On the eastern side, from what I have already stated, it will be 

 seen that boulders often form a prominent feature in the landscape, 

 but on the west they have hitherto been found to be wanting. Last 

 year (1874), however, I found them at several places, especially in 

 Louis Hills. They all seemed to point to the Laurentian backbone 

 for their origin. Eoches moutonnees are not so prominent upon the 

 west as they are upon the east, but scratchings and groovings along 

 the shore (which will be spoken of hereafter under the head of 

 Coast-Ice) are common everywhere.^ 



Drift. — In addition to all these evidences af ice-work seen in the 

 shape of boulders and scratched rock surfaces, we have here and 

 there patched over the country large deposits of drift filled with 

 regularly striated rock-fragments. 



In the neighbourhood of St. John's the drift-covering is noticeably 

 full of such stones. Similar material covering the country may also 

 be seen in many other parts of the Avalon peninsula, where we 



^ Many of the effects of ice now seen in Nova Scotia are described by Dawson in 

 his " Acadian Geology," p. 64, et seq., as resembling those now produced by frost 

 and floating ice. Blocks of stone are shown to have travelled from elevation to 

 elevation, across valleys which may have been accomplished by ice-floes or bergs. 

 Other blocks again are shown to have travelled from low plains to the summit of 

 hills, which is explained on the supposition that the land at the time of their deposit 

 being slowly subsiding, and the ice-fields of successive years raising them higher and 

 higher. 



