SUPPOSED EVIDENCES OF SUBSIDENCE OF NEW BRUNSWICK COAST 55 
the hooks. So far as the occurrence of the peat bed below high 
tide mark on the outer beach of Portage island is concerned — 
evidence of quite another kind — this is a common feature in 
retreating barrier beaches, and can be explained without appeal 
to coastal subsidence. 1 
Trees Killed by High Tides . — In a short paper in his “Notes on 
the Natural history and physiography of New Brunswick/' 
Professor Ganong says that on the low shores of the South river, 
near Pokemouche, “in places the dead forest trees still standing 
with their roots immersed by the highest tides afford striking 
evidence of the rapid subsidence this coast is undergoing.” 2 
An examination of this estuary in 1911, with the expectation 
of finding convincing proof that the tides at that place rise 
higher than they formerly did, proved a disappointment to me. 
It is quite possible that I failed to find the precise place to 
which Professor Ganong refers, although my search for it was 
rather thorough. Here and there, near the creek are patches 
of trees whose death, like that of groves farther back on the 
upland, seems to have been due to fire rather than to tides. 
Where the road from Lower Pokemouche to Tracadie crosses 
the upper end of South river, a number of dead spruces and 
firs occur near the river bank; but they stand in a bog which is 
clothed with characteristic freshwater vegetation. At one 
point where the highway between Six Roads and Pokemouche 
crosses the head of a short creek, about a mile south of Upper 
Pokemouche, there are obscure signs of an increasing sub- 
mergence by the tides. At the water's edge, where salt marsh 
grasses of the genus Spartina and meadow plants like Daucus 
Carota and Eupatorium purpureum are curiously mingled, are 
a few tall birch trees, now dead. According to farmers in this 
vicinity, the trees have been killed by salt water, brought up 
during occasional spring tides. Even if we grant that this 
explanation is correct, in this instance, we cannot safely argue 
from it that the killing of the trees registers more than the 
*D. W. Johnson: Fixit6 de la C6te Atlantique do 1’Amerique da Nord.” Annale3 
de Geographic, vol. 21, 1912, pp. 193-212 (particularly pp. 201-204). 
*W. F. Ganong: On the physiographic characteristics of the Pokemouche and 
St. Simon rivers. Bulletin of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick, 
vol. 5, 1906, pp. 524-526. 
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