338 THE GEOLOGY OF THE LABRADOR COAST. 



foundland. Southward it follows the line of floating ice, 

 which partially excludes Anticosti, but includes both the 

 Grand Banks and those shoals lying to the southwest- 

 ward along the track of the polar current, which on the 

 coast of New England flows between the coast and the 

 inner edge of the Gulf Stream ; along this line lie the 

 Banks, off Nova Scotia, and Maine, and Massachusetts, 

 together with the St. George's Banks and the Nantucket 

 Shoals. Its influence is likewise felt as far south as the 

 shoals lying off the coast of New Jersey. This current 

 would even seem to impinge slightly upon the north 

 side of Cape Hatteras, where Redfield supposes its final 

 influence to have been felt. Returning again to the 

 shores of the British colonies, we find this Shoal or 

 Syrtensian fauna most curiously interwedged with the 

 Acadian or New England fauna. This is owing, with- 

 out doubt, to the overlapping of the Gulf Stream upon 

 the great polar current. Thus, while the mouth of the 

 Bay of Fundy is properly a Syrtensian outlier, the head 

 of the bay, the coast of New Brunswick, the western 

 side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, ^the mouth of the river 

 St. Lawrence on its southern side, and a small isolated 

 area on the southern coast of Newfoundland, sheltered 

 from the polar current sweeping by Cape Race, and on 

 which a small branch of the Gulf Stream may possibly 

 impinge, are outlying areas inhabited by species most 

 characteristic of the coast of New England north of 

 Cape Cod, constituting a fauna termed by Professor 

 Dana the Nova Scotian Fauna, and by Lutken, the Aca- 

 dian Fauna. Thus between Greenland and Cape Cod 

 there are two distinct faunge : the Acadian, with outliers 

 situated north of 'its normal limits, due to the influence 



