40 Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 
In 1872, Dr. Dawson* said, that the Bowlder clay of Canada con- 
sists of hard, gray clay, filled with stones, and thickly packed with 
bowlders, and usually rests directly on striated rock surfaces ; though 
in Cape Breton, a peaty or brown coal deposit, with branches of trees, 
has been found to underlie it, and in some places there are deposits of 
rolled gravel beneath it. The stones are often scratched and ground 
into wedge-shapes, as if by the action of ice. At Isle Verte, Riviere 
du Loup, Murray Bay, Quebec, and St. Nicholas, on the St. Lawrence 
it is fossilferous, containing, Leda truncata, Balanus hameri, and 
Bryozoa. 
In some localities the stones in the Bowlder clay, are alions exclu- 
sively those of the neighboring rock formations, in others those 
having traveled from a distance predominate ; occasional instances 
occur’ where bowlders have been transported to the northward. 
Though the Bowlder clay often presents a somewhat widely extended 
and uniform sheet, yet it may be stated to fill up small valleys or 
depressions, and to be thin or absent on ridges and rising grounds. 
Beneath the Bowlder clay on the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa, there 
are two sets of striz, a southeast set, and a southwest set. In Nova 
Scotia and New Brunswick, as in New England, the prevailing direc- 
tion, is southeastward, though there are’ also southwest and south 
striation, and a few cases where the direction is nearly east and west. 
At the Mile end quarries, near Montreal, the polished and grooved 
surface of the limestone, shows four sets of striz. The principal ones 
have the direction of S. 68° W. and S. 60° W. respectively, and the 
second of these sets isthe stronger and coarser, and sometimes oblit- 
erates the first. ‘The two other sets are comparatively few and feeble 
strize, one set running nearly north and south, and the other northwest 
and southeast. ‘These last are probably newer than the first two sets. 
The locality is to the northeast of the mass of trap constituting the 
Montreal mountain, and evinces that the movement must have been up 
the St. Lawrence, which is the dominant direction of the striz in this 
valley. It is the Bowlder clay connected with this 8. W. striation, 
that is rich in marine fossils. 
At the mouth of the Saguenay, near Moulin Bode, are striz and 
grooves on a magnificent scale, some of the latter being ten feet wide, 
and four feet deep, cut into hard gneiss. Their course is N. 10° W. . 
to N. 20° W. magnetic, or N. 30° to 40° W. when referred to the true 
* Post-pliocene Geol. 
