I06 A summer's cruise to northern LABRADOR. 



that the Ctenophores, Idyia roseola and Pleurobrachia, as 

 well as another kind I could not secure, were beautifully 

 distinct far down in the pellucid depths. Fishing had 

 begun at this locality to-day, the cod having struck in. 

 It is evident that the ice having disappeared for nearly a 

 month the water iijshore undoubtedly had grown warm 

 enough to allow the cod and other fish to come into shoal- 

 water and spawn. It was manifest that as the season 

 opened later and later from south to north, the move- 

 ment inshore would be later and later from south to north, 

 and this fact has undoubtedly given rise to the popular 

 impression that the cod and other fish migrated from the 

 southern to the northern portions of the coast of our 

 continent. 



I anxiously questioned William as to the nature of the 

 interior of Labrador. He told me that there were plains 

 and terraces inland ; that there were toads and frogs and 

 " lizards," which being interpreted undoubtedly means 

 the salamander, most probably Plethodon glutinosus of 

 Baird. He had been here twenty years before he saw 

 a grasshopper, but this was not on the coast, but in the 

 interior ; and I know scarcely a better criterion of an 

 arctic land-fauna than the entire absence of grasshoppers 

 on the Labrador coast, since none occur in the circum- 

 polar regions, either treeless Arctic America, Greenland 

 or Spitzbergen ; but the interior wooded portion of the 

 Labrador peninsula supports a truly boreal or " Canadian" 

 insect fauna, with grasshoppers. 



Among the insects found were the showy caterpillars 

 of Arctia caja and a weevil. Of the more noticeable 

 flowers, there were a pink Arenaria, and a leek -like plant 

 which I have often seen on the summit of Mt. Washington. 



