The Dawn of Canadian History | Page 5

Animal life began first, like the plants, in the bosom of the ocean. From
the slimy depths of the water life crawled hideous to the land. Great
reptiles dragged their sluggish length through the tangled vegetation of
the jungle of giant ferns.
Through countless thousands of years, perhaps, this gradual process
went on. Nature, shifting its huge scenery, depressed the ocean beds
and piled up the dry land of the continents. In place of the vast
'Continental Sea,' which once filled the interior of North America, there
arose the great plateau or elevated plain that now runs from the
Mackenzie basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of the rushing waters
of the inland sea, these waters have narrowed into great rivers--the
Mackenzie, the Saskatchewan, the Mississippi--that swept the face of
the plateau and wore down the surface of the rock and mountain slopes
to spread their powdered fragments on the broad level soil of the
prairies of the west. With each stage in the evolution of the land the
forms of life appear to have reached a higher development. In place of
the seaweed and the giant ferns of the dawn of time there arose the
maples, the beeches, and other waving trees that we now see in the
Canadian woods. The huge reptiles in the jungle of the Carboniferous
era passed out of existence. In place of them came the birds, the
mammals,--the varied types of animal life which we now know. Last in
the scale of time and highest in point of evolution, there appeared man.
We must not speak of the continents as having been made once and for
all in their present form. No doubt in the countless centuries of
geological evolution various parts of the earth were alternately raised
and depressed. Great forests grew, and by some convulsion were buried
beneath the ocean, covered deep as they lay there with a sediment of
earth and rock, and at length raised again as the waters retreated. The
coal-beds of Cape Breton are the remains of a forest buried beneath the

sea. Below the soil of Alberta is a vast jungle of vegetation, a dense
mass of giant fern trees. The Great Lakes were once part of a much
vaster body of water, far greater in extent than they now are. The
ancient shore-line of Lake Superior may be traced five hundred feet
above its present level.
In that early period the continents and islands which we now see
wholly separated were joined together at various points. The British
islands formed a connected part of Europe. The Thames and the Rhine
were one and the same river, flowing towards the Arctic ocean over a
plain that is now the shallow sunken bed of the North Sea. It is
probable that during the last great age, the Quaternary, as geologists
call it, the upheaval of what is now the region of Siberia and Alaska,
made a continuous chain of land from Asia to America. As the land
was depressed again it left behind it the islands in the Bering Sea, like
stepping-stones from shore to shore. In the same way, there was
perhaps a solid causeway of land from Canada to Europe reaching out
across the Northern Atlantic. Baffin Island and other islands of the
Canadian North Sea, the great sub-continent of Greenland, Iceland, the
Faroe Islands, and the British Isles, all formed part of this continuous
chain.
As the last of the great changes, there came the Ice Age, which
profoundly affected the climate and soil of Canada, and, when the ice
retreated, left its surface much as we see it now. During this period the
whole of Canada from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains lay buried
under a vast sheet of ice. Heaped up in immense masses over the frozen
surface of the Hudson Bay country, the ice, from its own dead weight,
slid sidewise to the south. As it went it ground down the surface of the
land into deep furrows and channels; it cut into the solid rock like a
moving plough, and carried with it enormous masses of loose stone and
boulders which it threw broadcast over the face of the country. These
stones and boulders were thus carried forty and fifty, and in some cases
many hundred miles before they were finally loosed and dropped from
the sheet of moving ice. In Ontario and Quebec and New England great
stones of the glacial drift are found which weigh from one thousand to
seven thousand tons. They are deposited in some cases on what is now

the summit of hills and mountains, showing how deep the sheet of ice
must have been that could thus cover the entire surface of the country,
burying alike the valleys and the hills. The mass of ice