EARLY DEVONIC HISTORY OF NEW YORK AND EASTERN NORTH AMERICA 49 



a comparison adequate. Its walls are bathed in tints of purple-red, bright 

 yellow and gray-blue, the natural shades of the limestone, and these are 

 diversified by great streaks of white calcite which vein the mass. On its 

 top the green carpet of grass spreads downward as the slope permits while 

 over the jagged anfractuosities near the summit, a deep orange-red lichen 

 has added its color to the scheme. The top of the cliff is the home of 

 countless gulls and cormorants ever moving about it like a halo of fog 

 scuds and screaming sempiternally in the same shrill notes that echoed on 

 the sea cliffs of the lost mountain in the ages past. 



Seekinor for some clew to the rate at which the sea has been devourincr 

 Perce rock, I have looked for other evidence than can be found in the cliff 

 itself. It is not strange that so marked a feature of the coast should have 

 made a profound impression on the earliest explorers and here and there 

 are references to it in the writings of some of them wlio had found the Isle 

 Percee a haven for wood and Avater, and occasionally a note in the 

 relations of the Recollet and Jesuit fathers. In Champlain's Dcs Sauvages 

 of 1603,' I find this account of it but there is nothing in it that does 

 not fit the conditions of today. " The Isle Percee," he says, " appears 

 to be a very high rock sheer on both sides ; between these is an arch 

 through which shallops and boats can pass at high water. At ebb 

 tide one can walk from the mainland to the island, it being only four or 

 five hundred steps." 



The great explorer and founder of Canada was not then seeing the 

 rock as it' stands today. This is evident on reading the later accounts. 

 The single arch he describes may be that now represented by the passage 

 seaward between the rock and the obelisk but it is clear that the sincrle arch 

 of today was not then in existence. 



In 1672 Nicholas Denys, seigneur of Perce, " Gouverneur Lieutenant 

 General pour le Roy, et Proprietaire de toutes les Terres et Isles qui sont 

 depuis le Cap de Campseaux, jusques au Cap des Roziers," wrote : 



" Des Sauvages ou Voyage de Samuel Champlain de Brouage fait en la france 

 Nouvelle I'an mil six cent trois. Ch. i. 



