ai 



Sea- Cliff of the Lower Saint Lawrence. 305 



of an extension of the twenty-foot terrace of the Lower Saint 

 Lawrence, with increasing altitude in that direction. 



Sir William Dawson, in the passage cited from Logan's 

 "Geology of Canada," reports the discovery of the bones of 

 the whale and the morse in the gravels of the twenty-foot 

 terrace, at several points between Rimouski and Matane. 

 Although the present writer was not fortunate enough to find 

 fossils of that nature, small shells of common gastropod and 

 lamellibranch species were found to be rather abundant. Care 

 had to be used, however, to eliminate shells which might have 

 been ploughed under, after the fields had been fertilized with 

 seaweed. 



In order to distinguish this, the strongest of the marine 

 strands of the Lower Saint Lawrence, from the higher beaches, 

 it seems desirable to find a name for it. The phrase "Twenty- 

 foot terrace" is unsatisfactory for permanent use, since, obvi- 

 ously, this shoreline, when explored farther in the maritime 

 provinces, will be found to depart from the twenty-foot alti- 

 tude. Following Dr. J. W. Spencer's usage of Indian names 

 for the strong shorelines of the extinct lakes "Algonquin" and 

 "Iroquois," the name "Micmac shoreline" is here proposed 

 for the great terrace and sea- cliff of the Lower Saint Lawrence, 

 in honor of the great tribe of Indians who originally occupied 

 southern Quebec and Acadia, and whose survivors to-day add 

 to the picturesqueness of the more remote portions of the coast. 

 The period of time during which the Micmac terrace and cliff 

 were cut will be called the "Micmac stage." 



The Significance of. the Micmac Shoreline. 



The Place of a Cliffed Coast in Shoreline Morphology. 



The principles underlying the development of such a cliffed 

 coast as this ancient one at the twenty-foot level are well known. 

 It is a familiar principle, for instance, that if the relative level 

 of land and sea remains unchanged, any shoreline, no matter 

 how irregular it may be at first, will become straightened or 

 simplified by the cutting back of headlands and the filling in 

 or bridging of re-entrants ; and further, that it will ultimately 

 come to have the form of a long line of cliffs, at the foot of 

 which the waves, with ever diminishing force, encroach upon 

 the land. Obviously, the time necessary for mature cliffs to be 

 formed along a coast depends to a large extent upon the struc- 

 ture of the ground at which the waves are cutting. In the 

 case of the mature shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, the 

 cliffs have been cut back in unconsolidated glacial drift, and 

 their recession has consequently been rapid. On an indented 

 and freshly glaciated coast, like the fjord coast of Maine, it is 



