ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 197 



times." Speaking of some phsenomena connected with a boulder 

 formation at Brooklyn near New York, he says that he had come to 

 the conclusion " that the drift was deposited during the successive 

 submergence of a region which had previously been elevated and 

 denuded, and which had already acquired its present leading geo- 

 graphical features and superficial configuration." In the region 

 near the Falls of Niagara, on Lake Ontario, and in the valley of the 

 St. Lawrence, he enumerates many unequivocal proofs of emergence 

 and submergence during the modern period now under consider- 

 ation. He states that in the valley of the St. Lawrence he seemed 

 to have got back to Norway and Sweden, passing over enormous 

 spaces covered by deposits so modern as to contain exclusively 

 shells of recent species, resting on the oldest palaeozoic and older 

 non-fossiliferous rocks. Wide areas are covered with marine shells 

 of recent species, at the height of 500 feet above the sea, and where 

 all the rocks can be shown both to have sunk and to have been 

 again uplifted bodily, for a height and depth of many hundred feet, 

 since the deposition of these shells. At the village of Beauport, 

 three miles below Quebec, he made a collection of shells from a 

 cliff consisting of a series of beds of clay, sand, gravel and boulders; 

 and he states that when they arrived in London, Dr. Beck of Copen- 

 hagen happened to be with him, and " great was our surprise," he 

 adds, " on opening the box to find that nearly all the shells agreed 

 specifically with fossils which, in the summer of the preceding year, 

 I had obtained at Udde valla in Sweden, and figured in my paper 

 " On the Rise of Land," &c., in the ' Philosophical Transactions ' for 

 1835. Among the species most abundant in these remote regions 

 (Scandinavia and Canada) were Saxicava rugosa, Mya truncata, 

 M. arenaria^ Tellina calcarea, T. Grcenlandica, Natica clausa, and 

 Balanus Vddevallensis. All of them are species now living in the 

 northern seas; and whereas Lhad found them fossil in latitudes 58° 

 and 60° N. in Sweden, Captain Bayfield sent them to me from a 

 part of Canada situated in latitude 4-7° N." 



Ascending the St. Lawrence, he found near Montreal, at a height 

 of about sixty feet above the river, great numbers of the Mytilus 

 edulis, retaining both valves and their purple colour, associated with 

 Tellina Grcenlandica and Saxicava ritgosa, in horizontal beds of 

 loam and marly clay. He found the same shells at ninety feet as- 

 sociated with boulders of gneiss and syenite three feet in diameter, 

 characteristic of the Canadian drift ; and he was afterwards con- 

 ducted to a hollow between the two eminences which form the 

 Montreal mountain, where he found a bed of gravel six feet thick, 

 containing numerous valves of Saxicava rugosa and Tellina Gran- 

 landica. This bed he estimates at 540 feet above the sea, 306 feet 

 above Lake Ontario, and only twenty-five feet below the level of 

 Lake Erie. 



Such comparatively modern changes in the relative level of the 

 land and sea, were ascribed by the earlier geologists, and are by 

 some still ascribed, to a rising or sinking oft/te sea. Play fair, nearly 

 half a century ago, combating this opinion maintained by the Swe- 



