328 



A Week in Gaspe. 



Gaspe Bay, like most other good fishing grounds, is rich in 

 the humbler tenants of the sea, those "creeping things innumer- 

 able " fantastic and curious in form and structure, of which old 

 ocean is the great habitat, and which so vastly outnumber 

 the denizens of the land. By dredging, and in examining the 

 shores, and in the stomachs of fishes, we collected many interesting 

 species, though probably but a small part of those actually to be 

 found. The Bay presents many varieties of dredging ground, in 

 addition to the deeper banks off its mouth, which rough weather 

 prevented us from exploring. Much of the deeper part consists 

 of mud full of tiny foraminifera and containing Tellina Calcarea and 

 a fine Leda ; a mud in short, very similar in appearance, fossils and 

 origin, to the clay which the sea, when it stood at a higher level, 

 has left over all our Lower Canadian plains. Tn other places there 

 is a sandy bottom, full of the curious fiat cake-like shells of Echi- 

 narachnius Atlanticus, the " Dollar-fish" of some parts of the coast. 

 On the more rocky grounds, are immense numbers of various spe- 

 cies of Zoophytes and Bryozoa. One of the choicest spots that we 

 found was just off the mouth of the Basin, on gravelly ground in 

 about 10 fathoms, and with a strong tidal current. Here every 

 stone was coated with nullipores and zoophytes, and there were 

 abundance of brittle stars, echini, chitons, and two fine species of 

 sea anemone, in addition to many shells, I trust in subsequent 

 papers to describe such of these specimens as may be new or pre- 

 viously unobserved on this coast, and in the meantime give a list 



