REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I()l6 200, 



another set of similar furrows, having the same general direction within 

 5 degrees ; and I made up my mind that if these grooves could not be 

 referred to the modern instrumentality of ice, it would throw no small 

 doubt on the glacial hypothesis. When I asked my guide, a peasant of the 

 neighborhood, whether he had ever seen much ice on the spot where we 

 stood, the heat was so excessive (for we were in the latitude of the south of 

 France, 45 ° N.) that I seemed to be putting a strange question. He replied 

 that in the preceding winter of 1841 he had seen the ice, in spite of the tide, 

 which ran at the rate of 10 miles an hour, extending in one uninterrupted 

 mass from the shore where we stood to the opposite coast at Parrsborough, 

 and that the icy blocks, heaped on each other, and frozen together or 

 "packed," at the foot of Cape Blomidon, were often 15 feet thick, and were 

 pushed along when the tide rose, over the sandstone ledges. He also 

 stated that fragments of the "black stone" which fell from the summit of 

 the cliff, a pile of which lay at its base, were often frozen into the ice, and 

 moved along with it. I then examined these fallen blocks of amygdaloid 

 scattered round me, and observed in them numerous geodes coated with 

 quartz crystals. I have no doubt that the hardness of these gravers, firmly 

 fixed in masses of ice, which, although only 15 feet thick, are often of con- 

 siderable horizontal extent, have furnished sufficient pressure and mechanical 

 power to groove the ledge of soft sandstone. 



In Nova Scotia the term " loaded ice " is in common use for large sheets of 

 ice several acres in area, which are sometimes floated off from the rivers 

 as the tide rises, with sedge and other salt-marsh plants frozen into their 

 lower surfaces ; also with mud adhering plentifully to their roots. In our 

 speculations, therefore, on the carrying power of ice, we ought always to 

 remember that, besides gravel and large fragments of rock, it transports 

 with it the finest mud. 



Doctor Harding informed me that the surface of mudbanks along the 

 estuaries near Wolfville are often furrowed with long, straight and parallel 

 ruts, as if large wagons had passed over them. These conform in their 

 general direction to the shore, and are produced by the projecting edges of 

 irregular masses of packed ice, borne along by the tidal current. 



Essentially good and well-established reasons otherwise exist for 

 believing that in the Gaspe peninsula at least, the period of the 

 Middle Devonian was followed by a general coating of land ice. I 

 have written somewhat at length upon this theme and it is not neces- 

 sary to enter here into detail, but the premises are, first, the absence 

 in the Gaspe succession, of any true late Middle or early Upper 

 Devonian deposits ; second, positive evidence of the ice-worn, ice- 

 scratched morainic material outwashed and heaped together in beds 

 beneath the Upper Devonian fish deposits of Migousha on the Bay 

 of Chaleur. There is then reason for inferring that the late 

 Devonian was a period of cold which brought the land ice down to 

 what is now the edge of the sea at the northeast, and may well have 

 created conditions, regardless of the alternation of the seasons, 



