1911} Fernald,— Expedition to Newfoundland 121 
notes the official boundary is recognized as it is in the most pretentious 
publication yet available upon the flora, Delabarre’s Report on Botany 
in his Report of the Brown-Harvard Expedition to Nachvak, Labrador.* 
In the latter work, which in 1902 enumerated all the plants seen on 
the coast of “Labrador proper” during the summer of 1900 by 
fessor Delabarre, nearly 200 vascular plants were listed. The work 
which may yet be accomplished by trained and discriminating ex- 
plorers is shown by the fact that in Wiegand and Kittredge’s one day 
at Forteau and my five botanizing days at Blane Sablon, where I 
once more had the genial companionship of Kidder (principally ab- 
sorbed in gathering Esquimaux arrow-heads), 331 species of flowering 
plants and ferns were collected, and of these more than 200 are not 
in Delabarre’s list. 
As just intimated, Wiegand and Kittredge went to Forteau, Kidder 
and I to Blane Sablon. This division of the party was made in order 
to compare these two regions having similar geological and geo- 
graphical conditions, which will become clear by a brief description 
of Blanc Sablon and the neighboring coast. West of the Straits of 
Belle Isle the entire north shore of the Gulf and the lower River St. 
Lawrence is composed of Laurentian gneiss and allied rocks, except 
at the Mingan region, which is limestone. But the words of Sir 
William Logan describe the general conditions with authority: 
“‘Between this exposure [the Mingan Islands] and Bradore Bay, the 
distance is about 300 miles. The shore, which is very much indented 
by bays and inlets, and fringed with a multitude of islands, presents 
an almost continuous line of bare rock; but in no part of it have there 
been observed any strata, but such as belong to the Laurentian series. 
On the east side of Bradore Bay, which is situated near to the entrance 
to the Straits of Belle Isle from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the palaeo- 
zoic rocks again present themselves. Resting on the Laurentian 
gneiss, they run along the north coast for nearly eighty miles, with a 
breadth of probably ten or twelve miles.” 2 At Blanc Sablon (plate 
86, fig. 1) the flat country through which the river runs is a floor of 
Laurentian gneiss, in many places converted to shifting sand. Each 
side of the river the Cambrian limestones and calcareous sandstones 
rise as five terraces until at an altitude of about 350 feet (115 m.) 
they reach the tableland which stretches west or east and north 
' Delabarre, Bull. Geogr. Soc. Phila. 167-201 (1902). 
* Logan, Canadian Geology, 287 (1863 
