2*78 Canadian Record of Science. 



masses of crystalline rock, drifted far from it to the north. 

 These are not altogether new discoveries. I had inferred 

 many years ago, from stones taken up by the hooks of fisher- 

 men on the banks of Newfoundland, that rocky material 

 from the north is dropped on these banks by the heavy ice 

 which drifts over them every spring, that these are glaciated, 

 and that after they fall to the bottom, sand is drifted over 

 them, with sufficient velocity to polish the stones, and to 

 erode the shelly coverings of Arctic animals attached to 

 them. 1 If then the Atlantic basin were upheaved into land, 

 we should see beds of sand, gravel and boulders with clay 

 flats and layers of marl and limestone. According to the 

 Challenger Eeports, in the Antarctic seas S. of 64° there is 

 blue mud, with fragments of rock, in depths of 1,200 to 2,000 

 fathoms. The stones, some of them glaciated, were granite, 

 diorite, amphibolite, mica schist, gneiss and quartzite. This 

 deposit ceases and gives place to Globigerina ooze and red 

 clay at 46° to 4*7° S., but even further north, there is some- 

 times as much as 49 per cent, of crystalline sand. In the 

 Labrador current a block of syenite, weighing 400 lbs., was 

 taken up from 1,340 fathoms, and in the Arctic current, 100 

 miles from land, was a stony deposit, some stones being 

 glaciated. Among these were smoky quartz, quartzite, lime- 

 stone, dolomite, mica schist, and serpentine ; also particles 

 of monoclinic and triclinic felspar, hornblende, augite, mag- 

 netite, mica and glauconite, the latter no doubt formed in 

 the sea-bottom, the others drifted from Eozoic and Palaeozoic 

 formations to the north. 2 



A remarkable fact in this connection is that the great, 

 depths of the sea are as impassable to the majority of marine 

 animals as the land itself. According to Murray, while 

 twelve of the Challenger's dredgings, taken in depths greater 

 than 2,000 fathoms, gave 92 species, mostly new to science, 

 a similar number of dredgings in shallower water near the 

 land, gave no less than 1,000 species. Hence arises another 

 apparent paradox relating to the distribution of organic 

 beings. While at first sight it might seem that the chances 



1 Notes on Post-Pliocene of Canada, 1872. 



2 General Report, ' Challenger' Expedition. 



