Physical Features of New Brunswick. 203 



is flat, and for the most part covered with wood and forest 

 clearings, or, in other words, sparsely settled, and that only, 

 for the most part, along the line of our route. One of the 

 chief physical features in the otherwise level country, is Bald 

 Mountain, about twenty miles west of Fredericton. This 

 eminence or hill, to which further reference will be made in 

 the sequel, rising only a few hundred feet above the surround- 

 ing district, is composed of trap, and forms a portion of the 

 igneous belt which fringes the great coal basin of this and 

 the adjoining province of Nova Scotia. The view from its 

 top shows an unbroken expanse of forest, stretching far and 

 wide on every side, and as far as the eye can reach, with 

 long-drawn ridges alternating with valleys, whilst here and 

 there the blue waters of a forest tarn, a gap, or a clearing, 

 are seen peeping through the tree-tops. The dark shades of 

 the spruce and pine consort well with the lighter green of the 

 maple and other hard woods, whilst far above their brethren 

 stand the charred and weathered forms of many a noble tree 

 that perished in the afore-mentioned conflagration of 1825, 

 which swept almost diagonally across the entire province. 

 Along the road to St. Stephen's, a distance of eighty-five 

 miles from the capital — as, indeed, anywhere throughout this 

 portion of the continent — the geologist is constantly impressed 

 by indications of the Glacial Epoch, in the shape of rocks 

 planed and polished, as if by a lapidary, with grooves and 

 scratches running for the most part north and south, whilst 

 long trains of granitic and other boulders, with their concomitant 

 drift and clay, strew the surface everywhere, more especially 

 on the sides of slopes and valleys, where vast accumulations of 

 sorted sand and gravel form great mounds and " horsebacks." 

 These seem to indicate, as will be pointed out in another 

 chapter, at least two periods in the above far-back epoch — one 

 when the land was for ages clad in an enormous mantle of 

 moving ice ; another when the climate became less rigorous, 

 and the country was subjected to considerable further denu- 



