SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 



7 



destiny before it as a resort and summer home. Now, summer hotels are 

 scattered all along its shores to Frenchmans Bay, and colonies of summer 

 villas already occupy many of the more accessible capes and islands. 



The spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people spending annually 

 several weeks or months of summer in healthful life by the seashore is 

 very pleasant, but there is danger lest this human flood so overflow and 

 occupy the limited stretch of coast which it invades as to rob it of that 

 flavor of wildness which hitherto has constituted its most refreshing 

 charm. Yet it is not the tide of life itself, abundant though it be, which 

 can work the scene such harm. A surf -beaten headland may be crowned 

 by a lighthouse tower without losing its dignity and impressiveness ; a 

 lonely fiord shut in by dark woods, where the fog lingers in wreaths as it 

 comes and goes, still may make its strong imaginative appeal when fisher- 

 men build their huts upon its shore and ply their trade. But the ines- 

 capable presence of a life, an architecture and a landscape architecture 

 alien to the spirit of the place may take from it an inspirational and 

 re-creative value for work-wearied men no economic terms can measure. 



The United States have but this one short stretch of Atlantic seacoast 

 where a pleasant summer climate and real picturesqueness of scenery are 

 to be found together; can nothing be done to preserve for the use and 

 enjoyment of the great body of the people in the centuries to come some 

 fine parts at least of this seaside wilderness of Maine ? 



THE GEOLOGY OF MOUNT DESERT 



Condensed by George B. Dorr from a Government report by Nathaniel S. Shaler 

 and later study by William Morris Davis. 



[Statement approved by the U. S. Geological Survey.] 



mountains of the Mount Desert range are by far the highest 

 of the many mountainous hills that rise above the rolling lowland 

 of southern and southeastern Maine. Long ago this lowland, far more 

 extensive seaward then, was tilted toward the south until its southern 

 portion passed beneath the ocean, to form the platform of the Gulf of 

 Maine, while its northern portion gradually ascended inland till it finally 

 took on in the interior the character of a plateau. The tilted lowland, 

 in the portion that remained above the ocean level, became scored by 

 numerous stream-cut valleys, following down its gentle slope toward the 

 sea ; since these were excavated the coastal region has again been slightly 

 lowered, carrying the whole shore line farther inland, changing 

 many a land valley into a long sea arm and isolating many a hilltop as 

 an outlying island. Associated with this later change of level there 

 came a period of arctic cHmate which covered the region with a deep 

 sheet of ice such as that which holds possession now of Greenland — then 

 less arctic than New England possibly. The slow southward and sea- 

 ward flow of this vast mass of frozen water stripped from the land its 

 ancient soil, wore down the hills, deepened the valleys, and pushed the 

 accumulated debris before it to form the present fishing banks upon the 

 ancient coastal plain, the Cape Cod sands, and the deep gravels of Long 

 Island, besides blocking on its way the course of innumerable streams 

 and damming them to create the myriad lakes and meadowlands which 

 make Maine famous now as one of the greatest inland fishing regions in 

 the world. 



