26 
A steep, winding road leads from the left bank of the river to the top 
of the tableland, which rises from 880 feet, at the edge, to 1,000 feet a mile 
or two inland. Beyond this to the northeast the country is rolling. A 
similar tableland rises across the narrow valley to the west. A number 
of farms have been taken up on this plateau and the steeply tilted crumbling 
slate with some limestone beds furnishes a good soil. A few boulders 
scattered over the fields or collected beside the roads are chiefly of limestone 
or of harder parts of the slate, often well striated, but there is occasionally 
a quartzite brought probably from the northeast. Though no Laurentian 
stones were found, it is evident that an ice-sheet more than 1,000 feet 
thick must have moved down the valle}^. 
The Restigouche valley (Plate III A), running westwards from the 
junction, is cut down in a similar way through the tableland; but the only 
foreign stones found along the river were of quartz porphyry and of 
porphyrite, Laurentian boulders apparently being absent. The ice coming 
from this direction had a much longer route to traverse after leaving the 
' Laurentian region so that Laurentian boulders should be rarer than in the 
Matapedia valley. 
Oausapscal to Amqui 
The next region studied begins at Oausapscal, 35 miles up the river, 
and 454 feet above the sea. Boulder clay occurs on the hills on either 
side of the river; and on the southwest side, at 950 feet, small boulders 
of granite and amygdaloid were found on stone fences. On the northeast 
side granites, gneisses, porphyrites, and quartzites occur along with more 
numerous local sandstones and limestones. The tableland (Plate VII A) 
reaches 1,223 feet 4 or 4^ miles east of the river, and the presence of 
boulder clay with striated stones and the types of boulders just mentioned 
makes it clear that ice from the St. Lawrence region covered the district 
to a greater height than that. 
In the valley, in addition to boulder clay, striations were found 
running 40 degrees to 70 degrees east of north, a somewhat surprising 
direction. 
Following up the valley boulder clay was found near lac au Saumon, 
but no moraine was observed as a dam to form the lake. Two miles 
beyond the lake gneiss boulders were seen, and at Amqui the valley has a 
pronounced morainic character with knobs and kettles. An esker or kame 
is used as a gravel pit at the southeast end of the village. 
An excursion to a hill of quartzite 5 miles north showed along the v r ay 
surfaces of boulder clay, containing mainly local stones. The quartzite 
hill is 900 feet high and has ice-rounded surfaces with faint stride running 
from north 20 degrees east to southeast. The quartzite shows no bedding 
but has a large scale conchoidal fracture and is extremely hard, in spite of 
which it has been quarried lately for the building of a church at Amqui. 
It is worthy of note that the lower part of the walls of the church 
is built of typical Laurentian boulders brought by rail from St. Anaclet on 
the Intercolonial railway 13 miles west of Mont-Joli and 58 miles from 
Amqui. Fragments of these rocks will, therefore, be common around the 
village in the future; and Laurentian boulders will probably occur along 
the railway to the northwest, accidentally rolled from the flat cars used 
in their transport. 
