54 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



years. Unborn generations of Gaspesians will gaze upon the undimmed 

 luster of this magnificent cliff. 



The late Prof. James Hall, in one of his volumes of the Paleontology of 

 New York, under the happy title of " Dry Dredging," gave the numerical 

 results of collecting species of Helderbergian fossils from a certain field in the 

 Helderberg where the soil was largely residual and frequently turned over. 

 The figures were startling illustrations of the abundance of certain organ- 

 isms on the old sea bottoms. Though the fossils of Perce rock are arranged 

 in layers with relatively barren intervals yet it would not be possible to work 

 over one average ton of the rock without finding multitudes of remains of 

 specimens of the trilobite D a 1 m a n i t e s b i a r d i, or hundreds of individ- 

 uals of the brachiopods Chonetes c anade n s i s and Spirifer pli- 

 catus and other species according to their fertility. Let us reduce these 

 suggestions to absurdly low terms. 



Dalmanites biardi 



lo per ton - - - 60,000,000 individuals in Perce rock 



Chonetes canadensis 



100 per ton - - 600,000,000 " 



Spirifer plicatus 



100 per ton - - - 600,000,000 • " 



Leptostrophia magnifica tullia 



100 per ton - - 600,000,000 " 



Chonetes antiopa 



50 per ton - - - 300,000,000 " 



There are thousands of millions of organic remains in the little section 

 of ancient sea bottom represented by Perce rock. 



If one needed proof that the sea has always been the alma mttrix of 

 life, here it is, not to be surpassed by the daily scenes which have been 

 enacted along the Gaspe coast for more than two hundred and fifty years in 

 the codfishing. Millions of cod are yearly taken from these waters but the 

 cod fails not. If all these millions of all these years were taken together 

 they would not equal in number the remains of the animals now lying 

 imbedded in the Perce rock. 



Turning landward the eye rests first on Mt Joli, a low truncated rock 

 cone connected at low tide with the Pierced rock by a sand bar, thence 

 extending southward and separated by a short beach from another small 

 headland. Cape Canon, sometimes Battery point, all a rock escarpment of 

 vertical strata not more than 100 feet high at any point. To the south of 

 Cape Canon opens the broad Robin fishing beach, which reaches away to 

 the nearly horizontal outcrops of red conglomerate at the opening of Len- 



