HISTORY OF CURRIES MOUNTAIN. 
195 
part of both the northern and southern Highlands. In the 
south they are found on the top of the Quaco Hills and Shepody 
Mountain, nearly one thousand feet above the present sea-level ; 
in the north they form high hills on the Beccaquimic river and 
about the Blue Mountains on the Tobique, though it is not 
probable that they ever covered the summits of the latter range 
or the much higher hills about the sources of the Tobique and 
Nepisiquit rivers. In the central basin and in the depressions 
among the higher hills waves, tides and currents were at work, 
and by their action the hills were being levelled and the 
depressions filled with pebble, sand and mud beds, the con- 
glomerates , sandstones and shales which now occupy them. 
Here and there, where the waters were pure enough, corals were 
growing and shells accumulating, the former indicating that 
the temperature of the waters was at least sub-tropical. In the 
same waters were numerous fish, but mainly of types related to 
the sturgeon and shark, and along the shores basked frogs and 
reptiles of gigantic size in comparison with their modern 
relatives. For untold centuries this condition of things prevailed, 
the sediments gradually becoming thicker and thicker until they 
had attained a maximum of some thousands of feet. This 
would only be possible upon a sinking floor, and with a sinking 
floor sooner or later fractures must come. In the production of 
these fractures the Lower Carboniferous period came to a close; 
through the vents thus made, sometimes perhaps in single pipes 
or chimneys, in other cases along extended fissures, came floods 
of molten material from the earth’s interior ; in the eminences 
which have been referred to as occurring in Curries Mountain 
and elsewhere we have, now open to our study, what has been 
left of these old ejections. For we can hardly suppose that the 
whole of the materials poured out have been left undisturbed, 
and some of the events in the later history of the country were 
well calculated to remove them. Yet it does not seem probable 
in the case of Curries Mountain that its height was ever con- 
siderable. Its present base is too small to justify such a belief, 
and the relations of the sedimentary to the igneous rocks also 
