134 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



fault." It is beyond doubt the determinant factor in the existence 

 and course of the St Lawrence river. " Logan's fauh " gave birth 

 to the river by setting down a line of weakness along whose crushed 

 and broken rock masses the continental waters draining to the 

 sea could find their least obstructed passage; and thus began the 

 oldest of all great rivers of the earth and the oldest of all rivers on 

 the earth of which we have any definite record. 



The Appalachians of the Eastern Townships follow the normal 

 northeast-southwest course, but in Gaspe, as every one knows, they 

 swing about into a curve like a swan's neck or the upper line of the 

 letter S. There the northern mountains end at Cape Gaspe on the 

 land but their . vanishing point can be followed some fifteen "miles 

 off to sea southeast, to the rocky shoal known on the charts as the 

 "American bank." This mountain ridge or orogenic axis at the 

 north is unlike that of the Appalachian ranges at the south. The 

 ridges of these ancient mountains cross Nova Scotia in the normal 

 trend; their southwesterly extension off New England is largely 

 buried beneath the sea, and to the northeast they continue on 

 their course across Newfoundland. Looking at the sketch map 

 adjoining, one sees the different curves of these mountain axes at 

 north and south and between them an area which we must believe 

 was less involved in the profounder or axial movement of these dis- 

 turbances — the region of central and northern New Brunswick. 

 We are speaking of times and conditions when there was no Gulf 

 of St Lawrence, when the elevation of the mountains had brought, 

 if not quite all, at least most of the land now at the bottom of the 

 gulf, above the water line and the continent extended without break 

 from the preseiit eastern shores out to the islands and across to 

 Newfoundland. For long this ancient coast line was a series of 

 mountain folds between which the ocean waters entered in broad 

 channels southwestward, laying down the deposits of their own 

 time in their due succession. But from the time the most ancient 

 of these mountain folds were made, when the ridges at the north 

 took on their singular curvature, the whole area between their end 

 and the mountain axes to the south became an area of weakness 

 and instability. This sigmoid curve at the north is a factor of 

 profound meaning in the making of the gulf. It seems to be due to 



village of Perce, overlooked on one side by towering sea cliffs and on the 

 other by consecrated mountains over which Logan labored in his early work, 

 and here might well be placed a tablet commemorative of the lasting achieve- 

 ments of his great career. 



