372 Mr. J. Croll on Geological Time, and the probable 



When the ice goes, there is wild work on the hank. Arrived at 

 St. John, drove to the suspension-bridge. ... At this spot, 

 if anywhere in the world, river-ice ought to produce stria- 

 tum. The whole drainage of a wide basin, and one of the 

 strongest tides in the world, here work continually in one rock- 

 groove ; and in winter this water-power is armed with heavy ice. 

 There are no stria about the water-line "*. 



River St. Lawrence : — " In winter the power of ice-floats driven 

 by water-power is tremendous. The river freezes and packs ice 

 till the flow of water is obstructed. The rock-pass at Quebec is like 

 the Narrows at St. John's, Newfoundland, in the frontispiece. 

 The whole pass, about a mile wide, was paved with great broken 

 slabs and round boulders of worn ice as big as small stacks, piled 

 and tossed, and heaped and scattered upon the level water below 



and frozen solid This kind of ice does not produce striation at 



the water-margin at Quebec. At Montreal, when the river ' goes/ 

 the ice goes with it with a vengeance. . . . The piers are not yet 

 striated by river-ice at Montreal. . . . The rocks at the high-water 

 level have no trace of glacial striae. . . . The rock at Ottawa is 

 rubbed by river-ice every spring, and always in one direction, but 

 it is not striated. . . . The surfaces are all rubbed smooth, and the 

 edges of broken beds are rounded where exposed to the ice ; but 

 there are no strice " f. 



When Sir Charles Lyell visited the St. Lawrence in 1812, 

 at Quebec he went along with Colonel Codrington "and searched 

 carefully below the city in the channel of the St. Lawrence, at 

 low water, near the shore, for the signs of glacial action at the 

 precise point where the chief pressure and friction of packed ice 

 are exerted every year/' but found none. 



" At the bridge above the Falls of Montmorenci, over which 

 a large quantity of ice passes every year, the gneiss is polished, 

 and kept perfectly free from lichens, but not more so than rocks 

 similarly situated at waterfalls in Scotland. In none of these 

 places were any long straight grooves observable "J. 



The only thing in the shape of modern ice-markings which 

 he seems to have met with in North America was a few straight, 

 furrows ^ an inch broad in soft sandstone, at the base of a dill" 

 at Cape Blomidon in the Bay of Fundy, at a place where 

 during the preceding winter " packed " ice 1 5 feet thick had been 

 pushed along when the tide rose over the sandstone ledges ^. 



The very fact that a geologist, so eminent as Sir Charles Lyell, 

 after having twice visited North America, and searched spe- 

 cially lor modern ice-markings, was able to find only two or 



* Short American Tramp, pp. 168, 1/1. f Ibid. pp. 239-241. 



X Travels in North America, vol. ii, p. 137. 

 § Ibid. vol. ii. p. 174. 



