324 THE GEOLOGY OF THE LABRADOR COAST. 



the Stones and pebbles of this ancient sea-bottom, finely 

 exposed at Hopedale, are covered with nullipores and 

 polyzoa ; the Mya truncata still remains perpendicular 

 in its holes, and the most delicate shells, with their epi- 

 dermis still on, are unbroken, and their valves often 

 united by the ligament. The delicate Myriozoum has. 

 preserved its fine markings nearly as perfectly as in 

 specimens dredged at the present day, and the cases of 

 the delicate Spiochaetopterus are still preserved. It is. 

 evident that this deposit has slowly and almost imper- 

 ceptibly risen some four hundred or five hundred feet,, 

 without any paroxysmal movement of the continent,, 

 over an extent of coast some six hundred miles in 

 length. 



This rise of the Labrador peninsula must have accom- 

 panied the rise of the polar regions, including Arctic 

 America and Greenland, and in fact all the land lying 

 in the northern hemisphere. Many facts in the distri- 

 bution of fossils in these glacial beds, and the present 

 relations of these beds to deposits above and beneath 

 them, tend to prove that the glacial epoch occurred 

 simultaneously over all the arctic regions and the 

 northern temperate zone, and that the submergence and 

 subsequent rise of the continental masses and outlying 

 islands were synchronous in both hemispheres. Pro- 

 fessor Haughton has summed up the evidence of such 

 a rise from raised beaches and ancient sea-bottoms in the 

 American Arctic Archipelago.* The researches of Dr. 



* " McClure found shells of the Cyprina islandica, at the summit of the Cox- 

 comb Range, in Baring Island, at an elevation of five hundred feet above the 

 sea-level; Captain Parry, also, has recorded the occurrence of Venus (probably 

 Cyprina islandica) on Byam Martin's Island; and in the recent voyage of the 



