FORT CHIPEWYAI^ TO FOET. M'MUERAY 119 



It was certainlj a motley crowd, and some of its members 

 by no means honest. Chief-factor Camsell, who had just 

 come from Fort. Simpson, told me they had stolen from 

 every house where they had a chance, and mentioned, 

 amongst other things, a particularly ungrateful theft of a 

 whip-saw from a native's cabin shortly after an Indian had, 

 with much pains, overtaken them with a similar one, which 

 they had lost on the trail. Their departure, therefore, was 

 not lamented, and the natives were glad to get rid of them. 



We ourselves boarded the steamer for Fort McMurray on 

 the 11th, but, owing to bad weather, did not get off till mid- 

 day, and even then the lake was so rough that we had to 

 anchor for a while in the lee of an island. Colin Fraser 

 had started ahead of us with his big scow and cargo of furs, 

 valued at $15,000, and kept ahead with his fine crew of 

 ten expert trackers. When the weather calmed we steamed 

 across to the entrance of one of the various channels con- 

 necting the Athabasca River with the lake, and soon found 

 ourselves skirting the most extensive marshes and feeding- 

 grounds for game in all Canada ; a delta renowned throughout 



vegetable food was found, probably tropical, at all events unknown to 

 the botany of to-day. The foregoing facts seem to be at variance with 

 the doctrine of Uniformity, or with anything like a slow process. 

 The entombment of these animals must have been very sudden, 

 and due, one would naturally think, to a tremendous cataclysm 

 followed by immediate freezing, else their flesh would have become 

 tainted. A recent English writer predicts another deluge owing to 

 the constant accumulation of ice at the Antarctic Pole, which for 

 untold ages has been attracting and freezing the waters of the 

 Northern Hemisphere. A lowering process, he says, has thus been 

 going on in the ocean levels to the north through immeasurable 

 time, its record being the ancient water-marks now high up on the 

 mountain sides of British Columbia and elsewhere. It is certainly 

 not unthinkable that, if subject to such a displacement of its centre 

 of gravity, our planet at some inconceivably remote period capsized, 

 so that what were before the Tropics became the Poles, and that 

 such a catastrophe is not only possible but is certain to happen 

 again. As a conjecture it may be unscientific; but how many of 

 the accepted theories of science have ceased to be! As a matter 

 of fact, she has been very busy burying her dead, particularly of 

 late years, and her theory of the extinction of the primeval elephant 

 may yet prove to be one of them. 



