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BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY 
ing) roads and to explore routes for projected railroads; for all 
the old portage roads in the interior cling to the valleys as do the 
earlier routes surveyed for railroads. 
In reality, however, all interior and northern New Brunswick 
is a plateau into which the rivers have deeply cut and it is only 
hilly where converging streams have carved the plateau to frag- 
ments, or where occasional masses of harder rocks have eroded 
somewhat more slowly than their surroundings. 
This plateau structure is in recent years coming to be recog- 
nized in practice, for not only do a/ll the newer portage roads in 
the interior mount from the valleys to the plateau, where they find 
a drier, more level, straighter and often shorter course from camp 
to camp, but it is, as I understand it, by the utilization of the 
plateau, making crossings of the valleys on high bridges in their 
narrowest parts, that the Grand Trunk Pacific surveyors have 
been able to locate a practicable, easy-grade route across the 
province. 
