178 BELL ON THE SUPERFICIAL GEOLOGY 



band, there are facts which shew that the present state of things 

 has continued for a very great length of time. The principal of 

 these are the accumulation of sand bars and points along the 

 coast, and the wearing of the solid rocks in the channels of the 

 rivers. About ten miles from its mouth, the Darmouth river 

 crosses the Gaspe limestone in a gorge varying from 100 to 200 

 feet deep, cut through the whole formation, which is more than 

 2,000 feet thick, and tilted up at an angle of 45 degrees. At the 

 Mountain Portage, on the Magdalen, the river flows in a deep and 

 narrow ravine cut in the shale for a distance of a mile below the 

 high fall. It is not asserted that these ravines have been excava- 

 ted altogether by the rivers themselves, but they appear to have 

 deepened them considerably. The second stretch of the York 

 River cuts the Gaspe limestones and sandstones almost at right 

 angles to their strike, and often flows for a considerable distance 

 between perpendicular walls of sandstone, from twenty to eighty 

 feet in height. The river itself appeared to have been the principal 

 agent in wearing these channels. In some places large masses of 

 the sandstone, which are 'known to have fallen from the cliffs 

 within a recent period, are diminishing rapidly every year by the 

 action of the ice and water, while the accumulations of the frag- 

 ments, which are seen at every bend, when the water is low, afford 

 striking evidence of the great wearing and transporting power of this 

 rapid stream. Where the sandstone beds lie almost horizontally the 

 river has in some cases cut for itself a very deep and narrow channel 

 in the bottom of the main gorge. Two of these narrows, as they 

 are termed, are only about one foot wide, and yet the whole volume 

 of the river, at its ordinary height, passes through these confined 

 spaces. It was necessary of course, to carry our canoes at these 

 places, and although the extremely narrow portions were only a 

 few yards in length, the channels leading into them were in both 

 cases so crooked as scarcely to allow the canoes to turn between 

 the walls. The sandstone beds in this part of the river are 

 almost everywhere riddled with pot-holes. Many of them are 

 very deep, and by their constant enlargement they sometimes meet . 

 and merge into one another. In this way one of the narrow 

 places just described has been partly formed. One of the pot-holes 

 measured thirteen feet in depth and eleven feet in diameter, and 

 many others close by were nearly as large. The surface of the rock 

 at the top of one of the cliffs, about twenty feet above the present 



