406 Canadian Record of Science. 



Beyond this the Geology of the Maritime Provinces pre- 

 sents no materials for comparison till we arrive at the 

 boulder drift and other pleistocene deposits. In regard to 

 these, without entering into disputed questions any farther 

 than to say that the observations of the author, as well as 

 those more recently made by Mr. Chalmers, conclusively 

 prove that submergence and local ice-drift were dominant 

 as causes of distribution of boulders and other material, 

 there was evidence of great similarity. The marine beds 

 described by Mr. Matthew at St. John were precise equiva- 

 lents of the Clyde beds of Scotland, as were the upper shell- 

 bearing beds of Prince Edward Island and Bay deChaleurs 

 of those in Aberdeenshire and other parts of Scotland, and 

 the Uddevalla beds of Sweden. The boulders drifted from 

 Labrador to Nova Scotia were the representatives of those 

 in Europe scattered southwai-d from Scandinavia, and the 

 local drift in various directions from the hills was the 

 counterpart of that observed in Great Britain. The sur- 

 vival of Mastodon giganteus in Cape Breton, to the close of 

 the Pleistocene, is a decided American feature, and so is the 

 absence of any evidence of Pleistocene man. 



The conclusion of the author was that, in so far as palae- 

 ontology and the subdivisions of systems of formations is 

 concerned, the geology of the Maritime Provinces is Euro- 

 pean, or perhaps more properly Atlantic, rather than 

 American, and is to be correlated rather with the British 

 Islands and Scandinavia than with interior Canada and the 

 United States. The latter country, even on its eastern 

 coast, possesses a much less perfect representation of these 

 Atlantic deposits than that in the Maritime Provinces and 

 Newfoundland, though the recent studies of Crosby, Dale 

 and others, are developing new points of this kind in the 

 geology of New England, and Hitchcock and others have 

 shown that the New Brunswick Geology extends in Maine. 



The paper further discusses the bearing of these facts on 

 the successive stages of the physical geography of Eastern 

 America in the Cambrian, Silurian, Erian, Carboniferous 

 and Triassic periods. 



