EARLY DEVOA-IC HISTORY OF NEW YORK AND EASTERN NORTH AMERICA II 



SKETCH OF THE GEOLOGY OF GASPE 

 Gaspe (to give location to our observations) is the vast peninsula of 

 eastern Quebec wliich lies between the broad mouth of the St Lawrence 

 river and the Bay of Chaleurs, facing the waters of the Gulf of St Lawrence. 

 It is the Gaspe Peninsula, more trippingly termed in the French, Gaspesie, 

 and in the English, Gaspesia, charmingly corrupted by the habitant to 

 Gaspesy. Speaking with precision, and as we shall hereafter employ the 

 term, Gaspe is Gaspe county, which with Bonaventure county at the south 

 divides the great peninsula. It is Gaspe county which here concerns us 

 most, which carries the most striking contrasts of coast and mountain, 

 which is farthest from the world's thoroughfares and where the geologic 

 features are most invitin^r. 



Gaspe count)- in size might be a king's realm. It is as large as the 

 kingdom of Saxony or the state of Massachusetts, but its interior is almost 

 as much a wilderness as it was when the geologist Logan first began his 

 traverses of the region. The people of the country are scattered along the 

 shores in settlements given over to the cod fishing as they have been during 

 all the civilized history of the region, which extends back over a period of 

 nearly three centuries. Likewise the most interesting problems presented 

 by the rocks are marshaled along the coast which the relentless and inevit- 

 able ocean has exposed to its very foundations. Indeed the relations of 

 rocks and sea are knit most intimately to the life of the people, for the 

 eternal battle of the former has reduced to the merest remnants majestic 

 mountains of the past over whose disjecta membra the cod has found a 

 breeding place and home. Gaspe has taken its name from the very evi- 

 dence of the ocean's destructiveness for, it is said, the word is derived 

 from the term by w^hich the Abenaqui Indians knew an isolated obelisk of 

 rock standing on guard at the point of Cape Gaspe, towering to a hight of 

 more than 600 feet ; like, but loftier than the Old Man of Hoy which still 

 stands on the coast of the Orkney islands, the most majestic monument in 

 Britain to the disruptive powers of the sea. There is a singular propriety 



