QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS. 45 B 



report, it would appear that the fisheries and forests of the Queen Economic im- 

 Charlotte Islands will constitute their chief claim to attention, till such portanci 

 time as the demand for arable land leads to the utilization of that portion 

 of the surface which is fit for farming. 



Geological Observations. 



General Remarks on the Rocks of the Queen Charlotte Islands. 



The mountainous axis of the Queen Charlotte Islands from Cape St. Composition of 

 James to Skidegate Channel, and probably still further northward as axis. 

 far as Hippa Island, is composed of a mass of much disturbed, and in 

 some places highly altered rocks, which have at first sight an appear- 

 ance of great antiquity, but are found on closer inspection to owe this 

 appearance to the inclusion of great masses of easily altered contem- 

 poraneous volcanic materials, and to the fact that they have been 

 subjected to an extreme of flexure and disturbance which very fre- 

 quently takes the character of actual fracture and displacement, as has 

 been observed elsewhere on the Pacific coast. To work out the 

 intricacies of these older rocks, which maybe looked on as the nucleus 

 of the islands, would be a work of time and would involve much 

 patient labour. 



In a preceding report on British Columbia it has been found neces- Palaeozoic and 

 sary to include for the present the Palaeozoic and Triassic rocks under 

 a single heading.* They lie together unconformably beneath well 

 characterized Cretaceous beds, but are so much involved that no 

 attempt has been made to separate them except locally. In the 

 southern part of the interior of British Columbia both Carboniferous 

 and Triassic fossils have been found among these older rocks, but no Triassic fossils, 

 forms of greater antiquity. In the Queen Charlotte Islands, now 

 reported on, fossils have been discovered in the rocks unconformabl} 1 " 

 underlying the Cretaceous in a number of places. These serve to 

 characterize a certain zone of argillites and limestones, which is fre- 

 quently repeated in sections along different parts of the coast, as 

 distinctively Triassic ; and show it to represent the so-called Alpine 

 Trias which is so largely developed in California and Nevada. JSTo 

 forms distinctively Carboniferous or Palaeozoic have yet been dis- 

 covered, but from the intimate association of Carboniferous and Triassic Possible occur- 

 rocks in the southern interior of the Province, and more particularly boniferous 

 from the occurrence of a great mass of rocks largely volcanic in origin. 10 

 and believed to be Carboniferous in age, in the southern part of Van- 

 couver, — which forms part of the same axis of elevation with the 



* Report of Progress, 1877-78. 



