216 
BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
route, and must have been ever better in earlier times before 
lumbering operations had widened and shoaled its bed. 
Some day, the important historical sites of the Province will 
be marked in suitable and permanent fashion by our Historical 
Societies, and among the first to be fixed in this manner should 
be the ends of the Cains River-Gaspereau portage. 
i 
119. — An Absolute Measure of the Rate of Recession of 
the New Brunswick Coast Line. 
It is a fact familiar to all concerned with our physiography 
that New Brunswick is slowly sinking beneath the sea, thus 
allowing the waves of the ocean to encroach upon the land and 
wear it away. Naturally, it is a matter of much interest to 
measure this rate of sinking and the correlated recession of the 
coast. In an earlier note of this series (No. 83) I called attention 
to a very favorable opportunity for a measurement of the latter 
phenomenon. It is based* in brief, upon the fact that in the 
open level field which forms the northern and exposed end of 
Beaubears Island there happens to stand a line of old fence posts, 
cut so close to the ground that they are likely to remain indefin- 
itely undisturbed, and so situated that offsets at right angles to 
the line can easily be measured to the seaward edge of the field, 
which is being undermined and washed away by the sea. It 
should therefore be possible to use the posts as a basis for 
measurements at considerable intervals, which would permit a 
somewhat exact determination of the rate of recession. My 
first measurement was made in August, 1904, and is recorded 
in the aforementioned note, with a suitable diagram. In August 
of the present year, after an interval of exactly six years, I was 
able to measure the offsets by aid of the same methods, the same 
companion and even the same tape measure (or one exactly 
similar, since I possess two alike), In order that the measure- 
ments should not be influenced by any pre-conceptions upon 
my own part, I carefully refrained from reading my former 
figures until after all of the new ones were made and recorded. 
The results are shown on the accompanying diagram where the 
