BLANC SABLON 



me all the interesting points in the topography 

 of this valley, still more I missed the botanist, 

 whom I had left at Bradore to return the way 

 he came, for here, with two extremely different 

 rock formations, — pre-Cambrian and Cam- 

 brian, — there was a variety and a wealth of 

 vegetation I had seen nowhere else on the 

 Labrador coast. 



Professor M. L. Fernald, who in 1910 made 

 at this point a brief incursion into Labrador, 

 has most interestingly described the region in 

 the pages of "Rhodora." ^ "Here," he says, 

 "was an ideal place to study the vegetation of 

 a highly calcareous region side by side with 

 the plants of a silicious and gneissoid area, and 

 if any one doubts the dissimilarities of these 

 floras he can find no better spot in which to 

 undeceive himself than at Blanc Sablon." 



Like him I was struck by the flat, grassy 

 plains on the tops of the terraces, so different 

 from the rounded and irregular surfaces of 

 the granitic rocks with their wealth of mosses 

 and lichens and their comparative paucity of 

 grasses. Professor Fernald says: "The com- 



1 M. L. Fernald, "A Botanical Expedition to Newfoundland 

 and Southern Labrador," Rhodora, vol. 13 (1911), pp. 109-62. 



251 



