830 
BULLETIN OP THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 
(or of its discharge around Cape Breton) below the point to which winter chilling, 
■per se, and ice melting in situ, would reduce it. 
Schott (1897) and Hautreaux (1910 and 1911), abandoning the Labrador Current, 
saw in the Gulf of St. Lawrence the source of the cold coast water as far west and 
south as New York. This view is supported by so much evidence that in earlier 
publications (Bigelow, 1915, 1917, and 1922) I have described the cold Nova Scotian 
water that flows past Cape Sable into the Gulf of Maine as probably a direct con- 
tinuation of the current that is known to flow out through Cabot Strait on the Cape 
Breton side. 
Briefly stated, the evidence on which this view was based stood as follows up to 
1922, when Canadian experiments with drift bottles threw new light on the subject: 
The enormous volume of fresh water poured yearly into the Gulf of St. Lawrence 
by its tributary rivers, added to a deep current of slope water flowing in through 
Cabot Strait on the bottom (Huntsman, 1924), apparently, too, with a balance of 
inflow over outflow in the Straits of Belle Isle, and with the currents on the north side 
of Cabot Strait usually inward, while the rain that falls on the surface of the Gulf of 
St. Lawrence almost certainly exceeds the evaporation therefrom, make it certain 
that the current flowing out via the south side of Cabot Strait discharges a large 
volume of water. Experimental evidence substantiates this, for current measure- 
ments by the tidal survey of Canada (Dawson, 1913) seemed to establish a constant 
outflow there, at least 30 miles broad abreast of Cape North, with an average 
velocity of about half a knot per hour at the surface, which Dawson (1913) termed 
the “Cape Breton current,” but was earlier known as the “Cabot current.” 
Temperatures and salinities taken by the Grampus in the eastern side of the Gulf 
of Maine, near Cape Sable, and as far east along the outer coast of Nova Scotia as 
Halifax, in 1914 and 1915, pointed to a direct continuation of this “Cape Breton” or 
“Cabot” current southwestward alongshore, nearly to the Gulf of Maine, during 
these summers (Bigelow, 1917, p. 234). Futhermore, a dominant surface drift of 
Y knot per hour toward the southwest was recorded by the Ekman current meter off 
Shelburne, on July 27 and 28, 1914 (station 10231), only 30 miles east of the entrance 
to the Gulf of Maine. 
Thus the physical character of the water, combined with readings of the current 
meter, seemed to show a direct surface drift from the northeast along the Nova Sco- 
tian coast between Shelburne and Halifax, distinguishable by a considerable difference 
in temperature and salinity from the salter, warmer water that bounded it on the sea- 
ward side. These characteristics and the fact that we found such characteristically 
Arctic components as Limacina helicina and Mertensia ovum among its plankton 
seemed to classify it as actually the southernmost prolongation of the outflow from 
Cabot Strait (Bigelow, 1917, p. 357). 
Observations taken by the Canadian Fisheries Expedition of 1915 (Bjerkan, 1919) 
and returns from several series of drift-bottle experiments subsequently carried out 
by the Biological Board of Canada in the years 1922, 1923, and 1924 29 have proven 
the circulation over the continental shelf along Nova Scotia to be of a nature much 
“Huntsman, 1925, and notes kindly contributed by him 
