44 HAMILTON — OX TIDES OF THE BAY OF FUNDY. 



volume of clean river water which used in former times to 

 wash the marine alluvium out of these channels, is every year 

 becoming less, ovnng to the removal of the forest and the conse- 

 quent desiccation of the country generally. Upwards of eighty 

 thousand acres of fertile marine alluvium have already been 

 made up by the tides of the Bay of Fundy. 



Minas strait, of which mention has already been so frequently 

 made, is about ten miles in length, by from four to six in 

 width. In the very narrowest part, just at cape Sharp, it is 

 less than four miles wide. It seems almost incredible that, in 

 six hours time, a quantity of water can be poured through this 

 narrow gorge equal to a depth of fifty feet over an area of four 

 hundred square miles. Yet this is a not immoderate estimate 

 of what actually does take place four times in ever}- twenty-four 

 hours, during spring tides. It can only be explained by the 

 great comparative depth of this strait. It is a chasm much 

 deeper than the basin above, or the channel below it. The low 

 water soundings, even in the middle of the basin of Minas, only 

 show a depth of from fit teen to twenty fathoms. A series of 

 like soundings through the strait, near mid-channel, show a 

 depth of from forty to fifty-seven ftithoms. I can find no record 

 of any such depth elsewhere in the Bay, until we get down to 

 about the longitude of Digby. AVhether then we are to attribute 

 it to the eroding? action of the water itself, or to that great conveni- 

 ence in cases of diificult explanation, a " convulsion of nature," 

 certain it is that the bed of this strait is a great chasm from 

 three hundred to three hundred and fifty feet deep below low 

 water tide level, or more than double the depth of the basin of 

 Minas ; and that, were it not for this fact, the tides in this basin, 

 instead of being greater, would be less than they arc in Cum- 

 berland basin. 



Everybody who has heard of the tides of the Bay of Fundy, 

 has doubtless heard something of that tidal phenomenon locally 

 known as " the Boie." In the Cobequid and Cumberland bays, 

 and in the estuaries of the streams emptying into them, the tide 

 at its ebb leaves exposed iinincjjse ''Hats"' of sand and mud, 

 amounting in the aggregate to many thousands of acres in each 

 of these inlets. The more extensive of these flats are composed 



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