trading companies of New France- those that had to do, first with the cod-fishing on the Newfoundland Banks, and later with the fur-trade-are subjects of great interest, and the stories are filled with incidents that are distinctly thrilling.* The Coming Canada has little to fear for its future wealth, if the present intelligence in developing now displayed is maintained, and the prosecution watched by competent officials.

* H. P. Biggar. The Early Trading Companies of New France.

TH

CHAPTER IX

PHYSICAL CANADA

HE eastern three-fourths of the Dominion, from Labrador in the northeast to Nova Scotia in the southeast, and westward until the great central plains have been crossed, have no mountains of very great altitude. I should, perhaps, say "excepting the extreme northern part of Labrador." But our knowledge of that peninsula is still far from satisfactory. Indeed, I do not hesitate to say that beyond a smattering of information along the coast, we do not know anything at all about that region. It may be as has been asserted that there are peaks which rise to a height of from 7000 to 8000 feet above sea-level; but from the best information I could gather, I am rather inclined to doubt it.

In the extreme southeastern section of Canada, the highest peak is Bald Mountain, in New Brunswick, 2460 feet. Besides this there are rarely any hills which attain to 3000 feet above the sea. The Shicksock mountains of the Gaspé peninsula attain to 3000 feet in certain peaks.

If it does not tower to great heights, yet the Laurentian plateau, along Georgian Bay, the upper end of Lake Huron, and the whole of the north shore of Lake Superior, is extremely interesting to the geologist, since it is con

sidered to represent the oldest rock formation of the globe. In this aspect of the relative ages of the two hemispheres, it is manifestly a misnomer to call America "the New World." This hard, close-grained Laurentian rock presented a very serious problem to the engineers who built the first trans-continental railway in Canada, the Canadian Pacific. It was a most difficult matter to cut the road-bed; because the charges of explosives, no matter how carefully set and tamped, blew straight out of the drill-holes as from a gun-barrel, without shattering the adamantine rock at all. It was only when heavy charges of nitro-glycerine were used that the work was successfully accomplished. When I passed around the southern end of Lake Baikal, Siberia, by the Trans-Siberian Railway, I was reminded constantly of this section of the Canadian Pacific. Conditions were singularly parallel in both places. The almost imperative necessity for double-tracking the Canadian line, eastward from Port Arthur, in order to facilitate the getting of the yearly increasing grain-crop of the North West to market, when navigation on the Great Lakes is closed, is a task from which the engineers of the Canadian Pacific naturally shrink: but it has got to be faced and accomplished.

It is not surprising that this Laurentian belt for a long time presented a serious obstacle to the development of regions to the west thereof; and it was many years before settlements began to spread northward from the one available thoroughfare. But now that it is found that regions which had been considered too remote, too unsuited to husbandry, and too inhospitable for perma