1 882.] Glacial Marks in Labrador. 31 



In this inhospitable, rigid climate, where the Arctic current 

 passing out of Baffin's bay presses against the coast, bearing on 

 its surface an almost continuous expanse of floe ice, forming a belt 

 perhaps 500 to 1000 miles long by from fifty to sometimes one hun- 

 dred miles wide, the temperature of the Labrador coast north of 

 Belle isle is kept down to the average annual of 3 2° Fahrenheit, 

 so that the climate of the more exposed parts of the coast of Lab- 

 rador, particularly the capes and islands, is nearly identical with 

 that of Southern Greenland. Indeed, many of the insects, the 

 birds and mammals, as well as the flowers, are the same as those 

 of Greenland. 



At the head of the bays and fiords, where the soil is protected 

 from the chilling influences of the damp easterly winds which 

 blow inland over the belt of floe ice fringing the coast, the spruces 

 attain a growth some twenty and thirty feet in height, and the 

 flora and fauna is, in general, more like that of the region lying 

 near the limit of trees in the interior of British America. 



On the left side of the foreground is a hut of some squalid 

 fisherman's family, built of hewn spruce logs, banked up on the 

 sides and with the roof partially covered with sods from the wet 

 peaty soil. Judging from the houses of the Labrador fishermen 

 we have entered, the interior is as dark and dismal, as forbidding 

 and comfortless as can well be imagined, though this is not true 

 of many of the homes of the Labrador folk. 



Now the question arises, why may not this smooth, polished 

 rock-surface have been made so by the floating ice borne down 

 by the strong Labrador polar current, which flows past the coast 

 at the rate of three or four knots an hour? That it had been 

 done by land ice moving down the bay from the interior, we have 

 been able to prove by our observations at " Indian Tickle," a 

 deep, narrow fiord separated by a point of land from the northern 

 side of Hamilton bay, or Invuctoke inlet. A " tickle," to use the 

 language of the Labradorian, is any deep, narrow bay, just wide 

 enough to admit of a vessel's passing through it. The shores of 

 the Indian tickle presented much the same appearance, for here 

 the Domino quartzite, very smoothly worn and polished, in places 

 capped by trap overflows, runs under the water to the depth of 

 about thirty feet, forming a polished and smooth bottom to the 

 harbor. The marks we observed, and which proved conclusively 

 to our mind the course taken by the ice, occur about twenty-five 



