OF THE RIVER SAINT LAWRENCE. 



257 





areas of which, if summed together, would make a water surface nearly, if not quite, as 

 extensive as Lake Ontario, and of rivers rivalling in magnitude the largest affluents of the 

 St. Lawrence. 



The Ottawa, by which the waters of this region find their way out of the Laurentian 

 mountains, at the Lac des Chats, upon the plain of Montreal, is so copious of flood, that 

 it colors with its brown waters the north side of the current of the St. Lawrence River as 

 far down as Lake St. Peter; just as the turbid waters of the Missouri color.the west side 

 of the Mississippi far below St. Louis. Large as the St. Maurice River is, it is not larger 

 than the Gatineau, one of the northern branches of the Ottawa. The Saguenay is but a 

 tidal estuary arm of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the outlet of Lake St. John; but into this 

 also flows from all sides the drainage of another section of the same area. Reviewing, 

 then, the narrow southern and western border, and feeble tributaries of the chain of great 

 lakes, and the small rain areas of the peninsulas of Michigan and Upper Canada inclosed 

 between them ; and on the other hand, the great outspread of the northern basin, its many 

 large rivers and standing lakes, it may be justly said that the; basin of the St. Lawrence 

 is the basin of Canada; that it belongs almost wholly to the North, and finds its grandest 

 hydrographie traits of character in a country almost unexplored. Its whole area, Sir Wil- 

 liam Logan has stated at live hundred and thirty thousand square miles, more than eight- 

 tenths of which he says belongs to Canada, and the residue to the United States. Its 

 chief peculiarity lies in the reservoirs of water, great and small, scattered over almost its 

 entire surface, protecting its rivers from those disastrous floods which desolate the river 

 banks of other regions of the world, especially the neighboring valleys of the Western 

 States. So effectual is this protection, that the total variation of the level of the St. Law- 

 rence River, due to excessive rains or melting snows, and exclusive of the local influence 

 of the ice-gorges at its narrows, does not exceed three to four feet ; whereas the Ohio 

 River at Cincinnati has been known to rise sixty feet in as many hours. 



Having now described the leading features of the topography of the basin, and shown 

 how this must depend so largely upon the geological features of the whole district, it will 

 be interesting to refer to a table which has been prepared in considerable detail, and sub- 

 mitted, in the Appendix, marked 5, giving a list of the various lakes. It will be seen 

 that sheets of water, besides the larger lakes, the names of which have frequently occurred 

 in this description, are very numerous, and that they are found extending over a vast an -a, 

 of country principally on the north side of the longitudinal axis of the basin. 



It maybe said that all the largest of these lakes are hollowed out in the old Laurentian 



formation, and in its bands of limestone ; and, as has been mentioned, similar depressions 



occur in the azoic rock of the Adirondack country. The smaller lakes occur, also to a 



very large extent, in drift on both sides of the axis of the valley; and of these we may 



vor,. xiit. — 83 



