FAUNA OF THE BANKS. 



339 



of the Gulf Stream, or, perhaps, to the absence of the 

 polar current ; and the Arctic (Syrtensian or Labrador 

 fauna), peopling the coast of Labrador and Newfound- 

 land, sending outliers far southwards, due to the influ- 

 ence of the polar current. 



Having shown how these three faunae are limited at 

 the present day, it remains to notice how this distribu- 

 tion differed in Quaternary times. The arctic or polar 

 current must have sent a branch through the present 

 course of the St. Lawrence River into Lake Champlain, 

 in a general southwestern direction. This current was 

 evidently a continuation of the present Belle Isle cur- 

 rent, which even now pushes the cold waters of the 

 Strait far up beyond the island of Anticosti beneath the 

 fresh waters of the St. Lawrence River. It has been 

 noticed by Dr. Dawson.f who has satisfactorily shown 

 the effects of this powerful St. Lawrence current, that 

 the post-tertiary fauna of the St. Lawrence, as it has 

 been studied by him at Montreal, Riviere du Loup, and 

 Quebec, was in all its features purely Syrtensian, and 

 identical with that of the colder portions of the Gulf of 

 St. Lawrence, and especially the coast of Labrador. 



The clay beds of Canada synchronize and agree in 

 their general features very nearly with those of Maine, 

 as has been already observed by Dr. Dawson. All the 

 beds to the eastward of the Saco River afford a Labra- 

 dor fauna. About Portland and on the Saco River we 

 are, however, on the liijiits of the post-tertiary Acadian 



t Address of Principal Dawson before the Natural History Society of Mon- 

 treal, May, 1864, published in the Canadian Naturalist, where he shows that the 

 general southwest striation of the valley was "from the ocean toward the inte- 

 rior against the slope of the St. Lawrence valley." (p. 9.) 



