The Dawn of Canadian History | Page 6

that moved
slowly, century by century, across the face of Southern Canada to New
England is estimated to have been in places a mile thick. The limit to
which it was carried went far south of the boundaries of Canada. The
path of the glacial drift is traced by geologists as far down the Atlantic
coast as the present site of New York, and in the central plain of the
continent it extended to what is now the state of Missouri.
Facts seem to support the theory that before the Great Ice Age the
climate of the northern part of Canada was very different from what it
is now. It is very probable that a warm if not a torrid climate extended
for hundreds of miles northward of the now habitable limits of the
Dominion. The frozen islands of the Arctic seas were once the seat of
luxurious vegetation and teemed with life. On Bathurst Island, which
lies in the latitude of 76 degrees, and is thus six hundred miles north of
the Arctic Circle, there have been found the bones of huge lizards that
could only have lived in the jungles of an almost tropical climate.
We cannot tell with any certainty just how and why these great changes
came about. But geologists have connected them with the alternating
rise and fall of the surface of the northern continent and its altitude at
various times above the level of the sea. Thus it seems probable that the
glacial period with the ice sheet of which we have spoken was brought
about by a great elevation of the land, accompanied by a change to
intense cold. This led to the formation of enormous masses of ice
heaped up so high that they presently collapsed and moved of their own
weight from the elevated land of the north where they had been formed.
Later on, the northern continent subsided again and the ice sheet
disappeared, but left behind it an entirely different level and a different
climate from those of the earlier ages. The evidence of the later
movements of the land surface, and its rise and fall after the close of the
glacial epoch, may still easily be traced. At a certain time after the Ice
Age, the surface sank so low that land which has since been lifted up
again to a considerable height was once the beach of the ancient ocean.
These beaches are readily distinguished by the great quantities of sea

shells that lie about, often far distant from the present sea. Thus at
Nachvak in Labrador there is a beach fifteen hundred feet above the
ocean. Probably in this period after the Ice Age the shores of Eastern
Canada had sunk so low that the St Lawrence was not a river at all, but
a great gulf or arm of the sea. The ancient shore can still be traced
beside the mountain at Montreal and on the hillsides round Lake
Ontario. Later on again the land rose, the ocean retreated, and the
rushing waters from the shrunken lakes made their own path to the sea.
In their foaming course to the lower level they tore out the great gorge
of Niagara, and tossed and buffeted themselves over the unyielding
ledges of Lachine.
Mighty forces such as these made and fashioned the continent on which
we live.

CHAPTER II
MAN IN AMERICA
It was necessary to form some idea, if only in outline, of the magnitude
and extent of the great geological changes of which we have just
spoken, in order to judge properly the question of the antiquity and
origin of man in America.
When the Europeans came to this continent at the end of the fifteenth
century they found it already inhabited by races of men very different
from themselves. These people, whom they took to calling 'Indians,'
were spread out, though very thinly, from one end of the continent to
the other. Who were these nations, and how was their presence to be
accounted for?
To the first discoverers of America, or rather to the discoverers of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Columbus and his successors), the
origin of the Indians presented no difficulty. To them America was
supposed to be simply an outlying part of Eastern Asia, which had been
known by repute and by tradition for centuries past. Finding, therefore,

the tropical islands of the Caribbean sea with a climate and plants and
animals such as they imagined those of Asia and the Indian ocean to be,
and inhabited by men of dusky colour and strange speech, they
naturally thought the place to be part of Asia, or the Indies. The name
'Indians,' given to the aborigines of North America, records for us this
historical misunderstanding.
But a new view became necessary after