120 HARDY ON NOVA SCOTIAN CONIFERS. 



although comparatively recent, are still doubtless of high antiquity, 

 and were probably the haunts of the mastodon and his confreres, as 

 the deposits are doubtless coeval with the intervale of Middle river, 

 Cape Breton, which produced, upwards of thirty years ago, the thigh 

 bone of Mastodon Ohioticas, now in the Provincial museum, and the 

 flats of Baddeck, C. B., in which was found about seven years ago, 

 the tooth of Mastodon Ohioticus, now in my o^Yn collection. It is 

 the confidently expressed opinion of intelligent inhabitants who have 

 been in the habit of observing landmarks for upwards of half a cen- 

 tury, that the land is slowly subsiding. I have not yet ascertained 

 precisely the grounds upon which this opinion rests. This point 

 and others already indicated, may be the subject of notes on a future 

 occasion. 



Art. XII. Nova Scotian Conifers. By Colonel Hardy ; 



Part I. 



IRead May 3, 18G6.] 



A GLANCE at a physical map of North America, will shew how 

 the great prairies, extending diagonally through the continent, from 

 the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of the great Slave Lake in the 

 North- West, at this latter point appear to divide into two streams 

 the evergreen forest, here composed solely of coniferse, which forms 

 a broad and continuous belt from the eastern shores of Labrador to 

 the Pacific. 



These fir forests in their northern extension, ever growing more 

 stunted, gloomy and monotonous, at last merge into the treeless and 

 snow-covered barren, where the small Arctic cariboo and musk ox 

 obtain a scanty living on the lichens of the rocks, and grass-tufts of 

 the valleys. Their character is sombre in the extreme ; their 

 growth and appearance indicate the severity and hardships of the 

 climate ; the twisted trunk, the bare and bent top, and the profuse- 

 ness of the moss-beards clinging to the limbs of the spruce and scrub 

 pine, the almost exclusive trees of the region, shew how slow has 

 been their growth, and with what difficulty it has been attained. 

 Dr. Richardson states that, on the borders of the Great Slave Lake, 



