Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/469

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Cape Victoria is a fine headland of Silurian limestone, some 1000 feet high, resting on a base of conglomerate. I was fortunate enough during the few minutes we were on shore to extract a few fossils, one of them being an example of Maclurea magna,* which has proved extremely useful in fixing the geological age of these rocks. The flora on this hard limestone is much scantier than on the granitoid rocks, which disintegrate freely and form patches or pockets of soil. I only noticed a single species of Salix and Saxifraga oppositifolia growing. There again on the beach just above the ice-foot we found the lichen-covered remains of native encamp- ments, with several fox-traps, and fragments of animals' bones. At mid-day there was a fall of snow, which, freezing as it reached the water, converted the pools and lanes between the floes into a tenacious sludge, through which it was almost impossible to move a ship. At this juncture our vessel narrowly escaped being pushed on shore by the ice ; but at flood-tide the pack eased somewhat, and enabled a course to be made to Franklin Pierce Bay, which we reached on the 9lh August, where we obtained a certain amount of protection from the ice, in the vicinity of Norman Lockyer Island.

Landing at Cape Harrison, the western extremity of the bay, we found a series of old sea-margins rising in terraces to a height of about 300 feet, or to the base of the cliffs, which are composed of a grey limestone similar to that of Cape Victoria. These terraces are a very marked natural feature of most of the bays and inlets of Smith Sound, and show that oscillations in level are constantly progressing in that part of the globe. At some points summer torrent-courses had cut away the terraces, or else at these particular spots the banking up had not taken place. I was very much surprised to find that at these places where the basement rock was exposed it exhibited well marked ice-scratchings, and as there was no appearance of any glacier having existed at the spot I was at a loss to account for the phenomenon, until subsequently we became better acquainted with the power of grouuded floe-ice

Etheridge, 'Quarterly Journal Geol. Soc.,' 1678, p. 005.