
GLACIAL PHENOMENA AND SUPERFICIAL DEPOSITS. 253 
produced in post-glacial times. Some of these have been already inci- 
dentally touched upon, and as the importance of these deposits is small 
they will not be further mentioned. In the alluvial deposit forming 
the present bank of the stream, in the bottom of the Souris Valley, 
near the second crossing, about fifteen feet from the surface of the 
water, and six feet below the summit of the bank; a layer was found 
to contain numerous artificial chips and flakes of a hard cherty 
quartzite, for which the position indicates a very considerable antiquity. 
Buttalo bones are also frequently imbedded in these deposits. 
Pre-glacial aspect of the Country. 
584. Having in the above systematic detail, stated the facts as they 
came under observation, it may be well in briefly reviewing the pheno- 
mena, to arrange them in sequence as far as possible ; and that they may 
be better understood, compare these observations with those made in 
other neighbouring regions, and without entering at length into the dis- 
puted questions of glaciation, account for them as seems to me most 
probable. 
585. Before the close of the Tertiary, then, we find that the interior 
region of the continent had lost its character as an area of deposition, 
and had become one in which denudation was progressing rapidly—the 
soft deposits, especially of the lately formed Tertiary beds, suffering by 
this process. We know that waste had been progressing for a very long 
time, not only on the mountains, but over the whole surface of the plains, 
before the advent of the period of cold. There is every reason to 
believe, that the Laurentian highlands had at this time a very much 
rougher and more mountainous character than at present; while on the 
plains, the main drainage systems were already marked out, and there 
is much evidence to show that every river and stream, if not flowing in 
exactly the same course as now, had at least its prototype. 
586. The position of the valley of the Red River, must always have 
been that of an important stream, from its relations to the slope of the 
Laurentian on the east and the softer Cretaceous rocks on the west. I 
think it very probable, however, that in pre-glacial times it flowed south- 
ward, and it is even possible that the waters of the great Saskatchewan 
River also thus found exit, and were tributary to the representative of the 
Mississippi of to-day. For the Red River, a southern course would be 
the one coinciding with the general slope of the country ; and by the flow 
of a large volume of water in this direction, the excavation of the basins 
