NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NEW BRUNSWICK 
451 
portant of these is the exposure of much jointed and irregularly 
bedded soft gray sandstones which form the beach and low 
vertical wave-cut banks at the southwestern argle of the island, 
the only place on Miscou, according to the residnts, where ledge 
rock shows on the coast. The second place is beside the new 
highway road a little south of Lake Cienire, where, in a pit dug 
to obtain material for a new road, the same sandstones appear.* 
I am told also that ledge rock has been struck in a well near 
Wilson’s Point, and that it occurs on the beach in the harbor. 
Elsewhere, where the sea is cutting into the upland, as just west 
of Lac Frye, at Wilsons Point, at Miscou Harbour, at Money 
Island, south of Eel Brook, along the old bank-line at Grande 
Plaine, it is working against typical, compact, rather fine-grained 
glacial drift, which evidently forms much of the surface of the 
island, affording a soil of fair quality farmed by the residents. 
We turn next to the beaches. The shallow sea about the 
island has, according to the charts and the sailing direc.ions, a 
bottom sometimes of rock,/ but usually of sand, while close to the 
shore it is almost everywhere of sand. Further, excepting for 
the rocky shores at the southwest part of the island, the stony 
(small sandstone cobble) reefs off Birch and Wilsons Points, and 
occasional peat banks at points to be noted below, the beaches 
between tides are also of sard, gently shelving and compact, 
affording the finest possible beaches for travel, and, perhaps, for 
recreation in the future. And in most places the sand is driven 
by the waves still higher, until, intermingled with driftwood, 
gravel, cobbles and occasional boulders brought from Gaspe Dy 
the ice, it is piled in ridges above high-tide mark. Here the wind 
drives the drying sand still higher, forming low. dunes, up to six 
or eight feet high , which become sparsely clothed with beach 
grasses. Such beaches are formed only on flatly shelving shores, 
never against abrupt upland; hence on irregular shallow coas f s 
*The “Sailing Directions” speaks of a steep sandstone cliff at Birch 
Point ten feet in height. Yet as I, have myself observed there is no rock 
visible here upon the shore or elsewhere, and the residents say none is 
known to them. I think the compact glacial drift forming the bank has 
been mistaken for a sandstone ledge. 
