ISLE-AU-HAUT, MAINE, AND ITS LAKE 
A NOTICE OF SOME OF THEIR NOTEWORTHY NATURAL 
FEATURES 
Isle-au-Haut is an island far out in East Penobscot Bay, Maine, 
one of the larger among scores of islands on this coast which are 
but the tatters of the original shore lands, broken bits of the bones 
of Maine left on the field after the long battle between sea and land 
and glacial ice. Isle-au-Haut was discovered and named by Cham- 
plain in 1604, although Champlain knew his own language better 
than to call the island by its present designation. To him it was Isle 
Haute. Today the name is the survivor of various transmogrifica- 
tions which have come about through contact with the English who 
have ever had a genius for disjointing the significance of French 
place names. For generations of English settlement it was the Isle 
of Holt, the Great Isle of Holt, associated in the early records of 
the State of Maine with the Little Isle of Holt, now known as Kim- 
ball Island, close upon the northwest shoulder of Isle-au-Haut. 
The island has a greatest length of 11.4 miles and a greatest width 
of 5 miles and its northern end is surrounded by the lesser islands 
of the archipelago to which it belongs. As a small continental island 
it shows general features of structure and physiography common to 
its neighbors and the mainland, but there are certain details of 
special interest which have been created by its insulation and its 
individual history. 
GEOLOGY 
The island has a basic rock structure and surface confor- 
mation which are in essential harmony with those of other 
islands and of the adjoining continent. Its greatest length, north- 
east-southeast, is determined by the direction of the folded crys- 
talline rocks which makes its axis, Mt. Champlain, whose highest 
summit at the north attains an elevation of 500 feet. This fold or 
complex of folds is an index to the direction of all the other more or 
less concealed and involved folds which constitute the rock founda- 
tion of the island. These rocks are for the most part heavily horn- 
blendic gneisses and schists with plenty of diabase intrusions and 
frequent granite injections. The folds are pre-appalachian and are 
a part of the fundamental directive series of folds on which the true 
Appalachian folds of the paleozoic rocks have adjusted themselves. 
Just where this series is to be fitted into the subdivisions generally 
recognized as composing the Pre-cambrian is uncertain, but the rocks 
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