
“5 
re : : | 
rit! 
iv PREFATORY NOTE. . pp ae 
must tender my most cordial acknowledgments for their general 
co-operation, and it should be mentioned specially that to the indefatigable _ 
assistance of Drs. Burgess and Millman—tirst and second Medical officers 
to the Commission respectively—are due many of the most interesting © 
plants enumerated in Appendix F. 
In arranging the information accumulated for publication, I have 
discarded the form of diary or journal often adopted, and by so doing 
have been able not only to group the facts under certain general headings 
but by avoiding repetition and useless details, very materially to condense 
the matter. At the same time, in the arrangement adopted, it has — 
become necessary sometimes to pass more than once over the same region, 
in treating of different formations, or classes of facts. 
The main geological result arrived at is the examination and descrip- 
tion of a section over 800 miles in length, across the central region of 
the continent, on a parallel of latitude which has heretofore been geologi- 
cally touched upon at a few points only, and in the vicinity of which a 
space of over 300 miles in longititude has—till the operations of the 
present expedition—remained even geographically unknown. 
In working up the geological material, I have found it necessary to 
make myself familiar with the geological literature, not only of the 
interior region’ of British America, but with that of the western portion 
of the United States to the south, where extensive and accurate geological 
surveys have been carried on. It has been my aim to make the region 
near the boundary line as much as possible a link of connection between 
the more or less isolated previous surveys, and to collect by quotation or 
reference, the facts bearing on it from either side. In this way it has 
been attempted to make the forty-ninth parallel a geological base-line 
with which future investigations may be connected. The matter contained 
in the special preliminary report on the Lignite Tertiary formation, 
published last year, has in this final report been included, in so far as 
necessary to complete the general section on the line. 

