72 The American Geologist. August, I9v.i 
"Contorted beds, of unknown age, 
My weary limbs shqll bear, 
Perchance a neat synclinal fold 
At night shall be my lair. 
Dips I shall take on unnamed streams, 
Or, where the rocks strike, follow 
Along the crested mountain ridge, 
Or anticlinal hollow ; 
Or gently with the hammer stroke 
The slumbering petrifaction, 
That for a hundred million years 
Has been debarred from action. 
We can fancy him. too. sitting by his lonely camp fire on 
the shores of the Pacific and penning the following lines : 
"To rest on fragrant cedar boughs 
Close by the western ocean's rim. 
While in the tops of giant pines 
The live-long night the sea-winds hymn. 
And low upon the fretted shore 
The waves beat out the evermore." 
Dr. Dawson's gological work was carried on chiefly in the 
region of the great prairies of the North West and British Co- 
Ivimbia, but he was thoroughly informed as to the geology of 
all parts of the Dominion. In the North West he paid particular 
attention to the relations of the Cretaceous and Laramie for- 
mations ; and he discovered the presence in the Cretaceous of 
southern Alberta of an important series of rocks — the Belly 
River group — which, he says, "must be considered on the whole 
as a fresh-water formation. The Kootanie group was also recog- 
nized by him as constituting a portion of the early Creta- 
ceous in the Rocky Mountain region. His study of a large 
area in the interior plateau region of British Columbia estab- 
lished the existence there of a great series of mica-schists and 
gneisses supposed to be of Archsean age and succeeded by 
Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian and Carboniferous strata; 
while in the Cordilleran region of the same province he de- 
scribed the occurrence of great deposits of contemporaneous 
volcanic rocks, in various stages of metamorphism. While 
working in connection with the Boundary Commission also, he 
studied the crystalline rocks in the Lake of the Woods district, 
and concluded that a considerable portion of the Htu-onian 
formation there consists of metamorphosed volcanic rocks. 
