7^ NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



ing than in Laurentia which is a country overelevated and formed of 

 hard rocks while the folded paleozoic country is a low land, pro- 

 foundly worn, and with gentle curves. 



There are few regions on the surface of the earth where the 

 present geography is so intimately bound to a very ancient geog- 

 raphy, where the present relief has so great an antiquity as in the 

 Appalachian region of Canada. One may say that since the Cambric 

 or at least since the lower Ordovicic, the St Lawrence has flowed 

 as it does today from the place where Quebec now stands ; some- 

 times in the condition of a marine channel, long and straight, turn- 

 ing to the south of Anticosti and passing through Belle Isle ; some- 

 times as a vast fluvial valley collecting the waters of the immense 

 American continent and carrying them to the sea by way of the 

 Cabot strait, as it does today. 



All about the Gulf of St Lawrence the plan of the coasts is an 

 ancient plan, determined in its ground lines by phenomena earlier 

 than the Carbonic. The peninsula of Nova Scotia, with its curious 

 shape, is a Precarbonic link formerly connected with Newfoundland, 

 partly covered by the whole of a transgressive series which has re- 

 mained horizontal but manifests nevertheless the Precarbonic aspect 

 in the alinement of its hillocks and its coasts, in the rias which 

 characterizes the entire island of Cape Breton. The Bay of Fundy 

 has not changed since Triassic times and in those times it re- 

 sembled very much what it had been during the Carbonic. It re- 

 quires but little imagination to see this country as it was in the 

 different epochs of the Paleozoic, in the Gothlandic, in the Devonic, 

 in the Westphalic, in the Permic. In very truth, if any member of 

 the human family had lived in those times so prodigiously remote, 

 for example at the end of the Devonic, if he had then traversed all 

 this region already folded and prepared for the great Carbonic 

 transgression, and if he could return today after millions of cen- 

 turies of sleep and exile, to Gaspesia, New Brunswick or Nova 

 Scotia, it would not seem at all a strange land to him. 



The great orogenic movements in the Appalachian region of 

 Canada are of Devonic age. As always, they had been slowly 

 prepared by preliminary movements, and for a long time after 

 them the ground continued to undulate. Preliminary movements 

 and posthumous undulations have had, broadly speaking, the same 

 direction as the principal folding. The most ancient preliminary 

 movements date back to the Cambric. It is in the Cambric that 

 history ceased to be the same for Laurentia and for the Appalachian 

 region. 



The age of the principal folding is perhaps not everywhere 

 exactly the same. In Gaspesia and about the Bay Chaleur where 

 there are two highly fossiliferous Devonic series, one lower De- 

 vonic, the other upper Devonic, and where the great discordance 

 lies between the two, the principal plication is dated with reason- 

 able precision — the middle Devonic. No part of it seems to have 

 been delayed into the Dinantic. 



