3l8 THE GEOLOGY OF THE LABRADOR COAST. 



to crowd the ice into every harbor and recess upon the 

 coast. It was the universal cbmplaint of the inhabitants 

 that the easterly winds were more prevalent, and the ice 

 " held " later in the harbors this year than for many sea- 

 sons previous. Thus the fisheries were nearly a failure, 

 and vegetation greatly retarded in its development. But 

 so far as polishing and striating the rocks, depositing 

 drift material and thus modifying the contour of the sur- 

 face of the present coast, this modern mass of bergs and 

 floating ice effected comparatively little. Single ice- 

 bergs, when small enough, entered the harbors, and 

 there stranding, soon pounded to pieces upon the rocks, 

 melted, and disappeared. From Cape Harrison in lat. 

 55° to Caribou Island was an interrupted line of bergs 

 stranded in eighty to one hundred or more fathoms, 

 often miles apart, while others passed to the seaward 

 down by the eastern coast of Newfoundland, or through 

 the Strait of Belle Isle. 



The Labrador Banks. — Prof. H. Y. Hind* has pointed 

 out the existence of shoals or fishing-banks off the Ailik 

 Head and Kippokak Bay, composed of morainal mat- 

 ter brought down the fiords and pushed into the sea. 

 That the fiords and bays were, however, excavated by 

 the glaciers themselves we are much inclined to doubt, 

 since these bays and fiords were natural valleys, which per- 

 haps date back to Laurentian times, and which have been 

 for many geological ages excavated by streams, though 

 during the glacial epoch remodelled by the ice and sub- 

 glacial streams. Referring to Kippokak Bay, the next 



* The effects of the fishery clauses of the treaty of Washington on the fish- 

 eries and fishermen of British North America, 1877, Part IL pp. 68, 6g, quoted 

 in Goode's Fishery Industries of the United States, V. vol. i. 134-137, 1887. 



