296 (loldtJurait— Twenty-Foot Terrace and 



In tin- city of Quebec the twenty-foot terrace is occupied by 

 a part of the " Lower Town," and is rather obscure. A few 

 miles east of the city, however, both terrace and sea-cliff 

 appear, near Heauport, and extend with little interruption past 

 Chateau Richer, Sainte Anne de Beaupre, and Saint Joachim, 

 and presumably to Cape Tourmente. For most of the dis- 

 tance between Beauport and Saint Joachim the sea-cliff is in 

 full sight from the trolley line of the Quebec Light and Power 

 Company. It is a precipitous bank, from 20 to 50 feet high, 

 cut in glacial drift. While its course, instead of being straight, 

 is gently curved, there are no marked irregularities, neither 

 headland nor strong reentrant. It is a typical mature coast. 

 From the foot of the cliff the terrace slants gently outward for 

 several hundred yards to the present high-tide mark, and con- 

 tinues, in the form of half-submerged mud flats, for an eijnal 

 distance offshore. Its total width, from the foot of the cliff 

 to the outer edge of the flats, ranges from half a mile to a mile 

 and a half. Both cliff and terrace are plainly shown on chart 

 number 315 of the Admiralty. 



A view southward from Chateau Richer or Sainte Anne 

 shows a corresponding terrace and cliff on Orleans Island. 

 According to the Admiralty chart it is almost continuous 

 around the island. On the north shore the only interruption 

 is at a reentrant near Point Argentenaye, where the wave-cut 

 sea-cliff would be expected to pass into a bay-head beach. 

 The straightness of the twenty-foot shoreline appears to be as 

 marked on the island as it is on the Beauport-Saint Joachim 

 shore ; the terrace, however, is not so wide. On the south 

 side of Orleans Island the chart shows a nearly continuous 

 cliff, behind and above the modern beach, from one end of the 

 island to the other ; but it is more irregular in outline, and 

 the terrace is much narrower. 



Across the channel, on the south shore of the Saint Law- 

 rence, scraps of sea-cliff appear on the chart a few miles east 

 of Levis, behind Indian Cove, and in the vicinity of Saint 

 Michel. A wide break occurs in the reentrant at the mouth 

 of River Boyer ; but the cliff seems to appear again beyond 

 Saint Valier. Although the Saint Thomas River, at JVIont- 

 magny, has built a delta of considerable size at the present 

 level, no well-defined twenty-foot delta level was found here. 

 From here northeastward to L'Islet, the shore is protected by 

 a long island known as Goose Island. The Admiralty chart 

 (No. 315) shows a cliff on the north side of this island, near its 

 east end, where exposure to wave action is most severe. On 

 the main land a similar cliff appears a few miles down the 

 estuary, near Anse a Pierre Jean (Chart No. 311). This cliff, 

 which according to the chart lies not far behind the modern 



