GLACIAL MARKS. 2\J 



length from five to twelve inches, describing a curve from 

 three to nine inches deep, and at the bottom of the 

 crescent sunk an inch deep in the rocks. The hollows 

 of the crescents opposed the northwest, showing that 

 the glacier which produced such marks must have 

 moved from the land, filling the great bay of which the 

 fiord was an arm, and were sculptured in a smooth, 

 highly polished whitish gneiss. The rocky shore was 

 above the reach of the waves, but dampened by the 

 surf and spray, so that the surface was entirely free of 

 lichens, which covered the rock farther up from the 

 water's edge. 



That these were genuine glacial marks was evident 

 to me at the time, and afterward sufficiently proved in 

 my own mind when standing on the summit of Bald- 

 face Mountain near Gilead, Me., where the lunate or 

 crescentiform marks are abundant. 



Ice marks have also been noticed by Campbell in his 

 " Frost and Fire." * 



* "The coast is now rising between St. John's in Newfoundland and Cape 

 Harrison in Labrador. Rocks have been marked and the marks have risen ; boats 

 now ground on solid rocks where they floated twenty years ago; rocks which 

 were seldom seen now seldom disappear at high tides; harbors are shoaling; 

 beds of common shells are found high above the sea; raised beaches are seen 

 on hill-sides in sheltered corners; and blocks of foreign rock are perched upon 

 the summits of islands and on the highest hills near the coast. The rocks are 

 much weathered, and very few strise were found. Those which were found 

 aimed up-stream. At Indian Island, lat. 53" 30', near the lat. of Hull, they 

 pointed into Davis's Straits, at a height of 400 feet above the sea; at Red Bay, 

 in the Straits of Belle Isle, they aimed N. 45° E. at the sea-level. In winter 

 the sea is frozen near the coast to a thickness of eighteen inches or more; in 

 spring the northern ice comes down in vast masses. In 1864 this spring drift 

 was 150 miles wide, and it floated past Cape Race. From a careful examination 

 of the water-line at many spots it appears that bay-ice grinds rock, but does not 

 produce striation. The tops of conical rocks have been shorn off. The shape 

 of the country is a result of denudation. No matter what the dip and fracture of 

 the stone may be, the coast is generally worn into the shape known as ' roches 

 montonnees.'" (Vol. ii. p. 236.) 



