48 BEVIEWS — HIAWATHA. 



this department ; and in a country where so many curious relics of the ancient 

 world are constantly being exposed and washed away in the coast cliffs, even per- 

 sons themselves unacquainted with geology may advance the interests ot science 

 by preserving such specimens, and making them known to those who can decide 

 on their scientific value. 



The metamorphic districts present a large and almost unexplored field. The 

 valuable metallic deposits already found in them encourage the expectation that 

 farther useful discoveries may be made. The unravelling of the relations of 

 these disturbed and altered beds would require long labour and much thought from 

 the most practised and acute observers. The fossils which occur in the less altered 

 portions of their margins are very numerous, and well deserve the attention of 

 palaeontologists, a3 belonging to an outlying portion of the great Devonian and 

 Upper Silurian area of North America, far removed from the districts in which 

 the fossils of that period are best known. This ground may in part be occupied 

 by private observers and mining surveyors, but I have no hope that it will be 

 fully worked out without the aid of a public survey. 



The trap and new red sandstone of the Bay of Fundy are a vast storehouse of 

 curious and beautiful minerals, of great interest to students in mineralogy. These 

 rocks also furnish excellent opportunities for studying the phenomena of volcanic 

 action as it existed in the secondary period. The solitary reptilian jaw found in 

 Prince Edward Island holds forth the hope that, in the many miles of coast cliff of 

 the new red in that island and in Xova Scotia, other discoveries of similar charac- 

 ter may await zealous collectors. 



In the surface gravels and drift, and in fissures of rocks laid open by excavations, 

 fossil remains, whether of large animals like the mastodon, or of shells or land 

 plants, should be carefully sought for. The deposition of marine mud in the Bay 

 of Fundy has afforded many interesting illustrations of geological facts, and may 

 afford more ; and the agency of coast-ice in removing the masses of rock, and 

 otherwise acting on the shores and cliffs, is a subject at present of much interest 

 and one of which the shores of the Acadian provinces present many illustrations." 



In concluding our remarks on this important contribution to geo- 

 logical science, we must not omit to mention that the value of the 

 work is much enhanced by a great number of chemical examinations 

 of various samples of coal, undertaken by Principal Dawson himself. 



E. J. c. 



TJie Song of Hiawatha. By H, W, Longfellow. Boston : Ticknor & 



Fields. 1855. 



A new poem by Longfellow might have been imagined to be an 

 announcement welcome to all men, but especially to his country- 

 men — not generally indisposed to a sufficiently ostentatious pride in 

 relation to all that is their own. Not such, however, is the case with 

 this, the most genuinely native song that has yet given voice to the 

 wild wood-notes of our ancient forests. Heedless of time or place, 

 Longfellow should have made his Indian Cadmus reason like one of 

 Milton's metaphysical devils, or a German professor of the nineteenth 



