384 GEOLOGY OF THE LINE OF THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY. 
beyond America, since in the coast ranges of British Columbia the 
beds of this age are quite as violently disturbed and as much altered 
as in the mountain-districts of Europe and Asia. Throughout 
North America, however, there seems a far less development of 
great calcareous deposits than in the Cretaceous of the Old World, 
though in the Niobrara group we have Foraminiferal marls essentially 
of the nature of chalk, and toward the south abundance of marine 
organisms generically similar to those of the Chalk of Europe. In 
America, as in Europe, remains of Teleostean fishes become plentiful 
in the Cretaceous, and the Dinosaurian reptiles continue to the end 
without any indication of the placental Mammalia. In America 
as in Europe, angiospermous exogens of genera still existing 
appear in the middle Cretaceous, and Lesquereux has described in 
the United States, and the writer in Canada, a rich and abundant 
exogenous flora very similar to that still extant in America, from 
the Dakota, Benton, and Niobrara formations. 
The distribution of the drift over these plains has been fully 
described in the paper above referred to. I shall therefore notice 
here only such new facts and inferences as presented themselves in 
connexion with the line of the railway. 
At the west side of the Red-River plain, where the railway 
ascends to the second plateau (see Map, fig. 3), are seen sandhills or 
dunes, obviously an old lake-margin, and, so far as seen, without 
large boulders or other evidences of heavy ice. 
The second prairie plateau everywhere presents travelled boulders 
associated either with Boulder-clay or overlying sands and gravels. 
The percentage of Laurentian, Huronian, and Silurian rocks, and of 
stones from the Rocky Mountains among those visible on the 
surface, has been noted by Dr. G. M. Dawson, who has also men- 
tioned the line of elevations made up of drift, perhaps based on 
outliers of Cretaceous beds, which extends from Turtle Mountain 
northward to the Touchwood hills along the middle of this plain. 
In the line of these eminences, where the railway crosses on the 
plain, there is evidence of a connecting belt of sand and gravel 
with boulders, and within this are Oak Lake and other lakes and 
ponds. Thus there is really a continuous margin of the glacial 
sea on this line, and the higher and more marked hills are merely 
its more elevated portions*. 
The Great Missouri coteau to which Dr. G. M. Dawson first 
directed prominent attention as a glacial feature, and which fringes 
the margin of the third plateau, about 400 miles west of Winnipeg, 
is now known to be continuous with similar ridges extending. 
southward into the United States and eastward towards the 
Atlantic, and which have been described as the terminal moraine 
of a great continental glacier. In the western plains, however, 
where it has its greatest development, it cannot be explained in 
* The cuttings of the railway do not appear likely to modify the statements 
respecting the percentages of boulders; but they seem to show that, as m many 
other parts of America, boulders are more abundant near the surface than below. 
