8 
MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 14 
eoHan sand show the glazing and facetting peculiar to wind 
scour. The largest boulder noticed was a granite boulder 3 by 2 
by 2 feet, at the foot of the bluff, on the shore of the basin. 
Granting that this is an ice-bome deposit, unlike any that 
has been reported hitherto from the Magdalens, the question, 
of course, arises: is it the deposit of a continental glacier or of 
sea-ice during a period of submergence ? The absence of strati- 
fication and the rather considerable thickness of the deposit 
would seem to indicate that it is true ground moraine. Although 
the foreign stones might have been brought either by an ice 
sheet or by drifting sea ice, the well worn shapes and the striated 
surfaces of the stones of the local diabase are less easily explained 
as the product of sea-ice than as the product of a slowly advancing 
ice sheet, particularly because of the strong longitudinal tendency 
of the striae already mentioned. Local pebbles encased in shore 
ice or icebergs would as likely acquire scratches in directions 
oblique and transverse to their long aixes as parallel to them; 
in short, the scratches would run without system in all directions. 
For these reasons, and because of evidence of the glaciation of 
nearby coasts, to be mentioned more particularly later, the writer 
holds the view that the deposit at Amherst is glacial till. 
Looking towards the village of Amherst from the pier, 
one sees in the cliffs near Demoiselle hill a red mantle of sand or 
boulder clay unconformably overlying the buff-weathering sand- 
stone and the black diabase. Although time did not permit 
close inspection of this place, it seems likely that the red boulder 
clay at Fish town extends across the island to Demoiselle hill. 
GRINDSTONE ISLAND. 
At Cape aux Meules, where the boat touches Grindstone 
island, the evidence of glaciation is indeed obscure. The high 
hill of grey sandstone which overlooks the pier is covered with a 
sheet of residual soil 3 feet thick, answering the descriptions 
of Richardson and his successors in the field. Not a single 
foreign pebble was found in this mantle — only the discoidal 
fragments of decayed sandstone. Along the cliffed shore about 
a quarter of a mile north of the pier, however, one finds the 
