NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIOGRAPHY OP NEW BRUNSWICK. 
313 
ARTICLE VI. 
2NOTES ON THE NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIO- 
GRAPHY OF NEW BRUNSWICK. 
By W. F. Ganong. 
32. — The Physiographic Origin of our Portage Routes. 
Everybody who has travelled much through New Brunswick by 
the primitive method, i. e., the canoe, must have been struck by the 
remarkable arrangement of the rivers with reference to ease of travel 
in every direction. The St. John is the main artery of travel, and it 
sends large branches out to meet every large river on the Gulf and 
River St. Lawrence slopes on the one side, and to the branches of the 
Penobscot on the other ; and between the streams which thus head 
together there are usually short and nearly level portages. Moreover, 
there are equally easy cross-communications between the smaller 
rivers, so that the province was covered by a network of these routes 
of travel, a fact brought out strikingly by a map recently published in 
the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (v, sect, ii, page 213). 
So remarkable is this heading together of the rivers, with the accom- 
paniment of easy portages, that it must be the result of some funda- 
mental and widely operating set of causes. These are found, without 
doubt, in past changes in our rivers, which are continually changing 
their valleys, moving their watersheds and robbing one another’s basins. 
The easy portages in nearly every case follow former valleys of one or 
the other of the streams they connect, and the heading together of the 
rivers is a result of the fact that the heads of what are now two 
streams, formerly were parts of one. This is not true of all portage 
routes, but it is true of most of them, as the Kennebecasis-Anagance> 
the Salmon River-Richibucto, the Tobique-Nepisiguit, the Grand River- 
Restigouche, etc. New Brunswick has been so long under erosion 
that there has been time for innumerable changes in her valleys, 
