86 



been elaborated in detail by Clarke. The Devonian rocks 

 at and near Campbellton are similarly intruded and altered 

 by volcanics. They became of general interest through the 

 discovery by Ells and Foord, some thirty years ago, of 

 fish and plant remains, and it is to these fossils that geologic 

 interest at this point has been chiefly directed. 



The Gaspe Peninsula, bounded on the south by the Bay 

 Chaleur, on the north by the St. Lawrence river, and 

 fronting east on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, covers an area 

 of about 11,000 square miles (28,600 sq. km.). It is larger 

 than the Kingdom of Saxony and twice the size of the 

 State of Massachusetts. The interior of this great penin- 

 sula is a rolling, heavily timbered wilderness, only the 

 coast region, for a maximum width of 10 miles (18 km.), 

 having been opened to settlement. Its geological struc- 

 ture is best exposed in the sea sections, some of which are 

 very striking. The peninsula constitutes the northernmost 

 and terminal region of the Appalachian Mountain system 

 and here the folded ridges take on their most pronounced 

 sigmoid curvature, bending from the SW.-NE. direction 

 which is normal to them at the south, through an arc at 

 the north which ends at Cape Gaspe in a NW.-SE. curve. 

 Pertaining thus to the Appalachian system, the Gaspe 

 region is quite exclusively an area of Palaeozoic rocks. 

 The Notre Dame or Shickshock* mountains, which are 

 the greatest elevations of the peninsula, (3,000- 4000 feet 

 or 900-1,200 m.), lie at the north and carry areas of mica 

 schists, jaspilites and epidotised gneiss, evidently forming 

 a basement to the Cambrian shales, but the Pre-Cambrian 

 age of none of these has been demonstrated. Peridotites 

 and serpentines are also of extensive occurrence in these 

 mountains. Generally speaking, Gaspe is a region of regular 

 appalachian folds and extensive overthrusts of the older 

 Palaeozoic strata, the extraordinary displacements in which 

 have been largely concealed by a mantle of later (Devono- 

 Carboniferous) nearly horizontal sandstones and conglo- 

 merates. 



The geology of Gaspe was first studied by Sir William 

 Logan in 1845. It was the first field he entered after his 

 organization of the Geological Survey of Canada, and 

 his reports upon the region are still fundamental. Later 



* Notre Dame is Champlain's name for these mountains; Shickshock, the Micmac 

 Indian name. 



