440 BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
height, but with higher country behind, all very densely wooded. 
And thus the river continues down to Lake Stream. 
Lake Stream is the most important branch of Salmon River 
next after the Gaspereau. I have myself seen it only at the 
mouth, but have received much valued information concerning 
it from those mentioned in an earlier footnote. It heads in 
two lakes as shown by the map. The upper Lake is about a 
mile and a half long, surrounded by heath, and sixteen feet 
deep with muddy bottom, while the Lower Lake, connected 
with the upper by a thoroughfare, is somewhat smaller, with 
gravelly bottom, twelve to eighteen feet deep. At the head 
of the upper Lake is the spring supposed by some to be poisonous 
to fish, as described earlier in one of these notes (No. 79 in Bulletin 
No. XXII, 238).* Leaving the Lower Lake the stream quietly 
runs for some two miles through alders, and then becomes a 
good canoe stream, flowing smoothly through alternate burnt 
land and green woods, in a valley that sometimes is cut rather 
deeply into the country (at least such is true at a point south of 
Little Forks where I have seen it) ; and thus it continues down 
to within less than a mile of its mouth, when it becomes stony 
and shoal for the rest of the distance. 
One of the branches is Coy Brook, shown on our map, and 
upon it occurs a remarkable pile of great boulders described, 
from Mr. Welch’s letters, in an earlier one of these notes (No. 
79 in Bulletin No. XXII, 239). 
It is only a mile from Lake Stream to Big Forks Stream. 
Mr. Welch has sketched this stream for me to its head, and I 
have worked his data into the accompanying map. He tells 
me the banks of the river are flat up to McLeod Brook, whence 
up to Mountain Brook the banks are steep ledges and cliffs 
*The fact of the occurrence at times of large numbers of dead fish in this lake is well known 
locally, and a great puzzle. Mr. Leonard Smith tells me he has seen a great many dead fish, 
White Perch and Suckers, in the outlet of Coal Branch Lake; and this, I presume, is precisely 
the same phenomenon, due to the same causes. Dead fish at Lake Stream Lake (obviously) 
are mentioned by Rowan in his Emigrant and Sportsman in Canada, 257; he saw them chased 
out upon the ice by a trapped Otter, but this cannot be the ordinary explanation. My own 
theory is this, that at times in these shallow and fish-infested lakes, the supply of dissolved 
oxygen, essential to the support of fish life, falls for some reason below the normal, causing 
the death of the weaker individuals. 
