QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS. 91 B 



opens westward to the Pacific the crystalline rocks there forming its 



sides ure heavily glaciated. 



Owing to the dense forest covering of the country, sections of the Boulder clay, 

 clays and sands which rest at least in some of the hollows are seldom 

 found, but in the cuttings made on the road to the now abandoned 

 Cowgitz coal mine, and in the banks of the brook, a true boulder clay, 

 a hard greyish sandy material packed with stones and boulders of 

 various sizes, is shown. This is the most southern locality in which 

 boulder clay was clearly distinguished in the islands. 



The character of the coast between Skidegate and Masset Inlets has 

 already been described in sufficient detail, with the great stretch of 

 flat country which forms the north-eastern part of Graham Island. 

 The long lines of wasting cliff on the eastward-facing shore present 

 excellent sections of the deposits of which this low land is composed, 

 and these appear with scarcely any exception to be those of the glacial 

 or even jet more modern periods. 



A few miles north of Lawn Point, at the entrance to Skidegate, the Section of clays 



' . an d sands. 



most southern exposure is found in alow cliff or bank, in which deposits 

 evidently of glacial age are cut off above by a gently undulating surface 

 of denudation, and overlain by ten or fifteen feet of superficial material 

 which shows no sign of blending with that below. The upper deposit 

 consists of sand and well rounded gravel, in regular and often nearly 

 horizontal layers. It has become in places quite hard, being apparently 

 cemented with ferruginous matter. Its lower layers hold some small 

 boulders, a few of which measure eighteen, inches or two feet in 

 diameter. The lower deposit at the north end of the exposure — which 

 may be in all about two hundred yards in length — is a typical boulder 

 clay, with many half-rounded and sub-angular stones and occasional 

 boulders of some size. The matrix is bluish-grey, hard and somewhat 

 arenaceous. The whole is irregularly mingled, and shows no sign of 

 bedding. The boulders were not observed to be striated, but smaller 

 stones now loose on the beach were so. Among the fragments pieces 

 of lignite from the Tertiary formation, which there is good reason to 

 believe underlies all this region, are quite abundant. When followed a 

 few yards southward this boulder clay begins to show bedding and to 

 become interstratified with hard clayey gravels composed of well- 

 rounded pebbles. The bedding of these is undulating and rather Included shells 

 irregular, and there is, as may be supposed, some local unconformity 

 by erosion between the different layers. A few paces further on these 

 become interbedded with, and are eventually replaced b}", hard bluish- 

 grey arenaceous clays, which hold only occasional pebbly layers, but 

 contain in abundance imperfect and broken specimens of several species 

 of molluscs, among which Leda fossa is the most common. A small 



