ke-filled country there is no comparison. From the map it will be
noticed that the largest and most thickly strewn lakes occur within five
hundred or a thousand miles of Hudson Bay, and belong to the Archean
protaxis or project beyond its edges into the Palaeozoic sedimentary
rocks which lean against it. The most famous of the lakes are those of
the St Lawrence system, which form part of the southern boundary of
Canada and are shared with the United States; but many others have the
right to be called "Great Lakes" from their magnitude. There are nine
others which have a length of more than 100 m., and thirty-five which
are more than 50 m. long. Within the Archean protaxis they are of the
most varied shapes, since they represent merely portions of the
irregular surface inundated by some morainic dam at the lowest point.
Comparatively few have simple outlines and an unbroken surface of water,
the great majority running into long irregular bays and containing many
islands, sometimes even thousands in number, as in Georgian Bay and
Lake-of-the-Woods. In the Cordilleran region on the other hand the lakes
are long, narrow and deep, in reality sections of mountain valleys
occupied by fresh water, just as the fjords of the adjoining coast are
valleys occupied by the sea. The lakes of the different regions present
the same features as the nearest sea coasts but on a smaller scale. The
majority of the lakes have rocky shores and islands and great variety of
depth, many of the smaller ones, however, are rimmed with marshes and
are slowly filling up with vegetable matter, ultimately becoming peat
bogs, the _muskegs_ of the Indian. Most of Canada is so well watered
that the lakes have outlets and are kept fresh, but there are a few
small lakes in southern Saskatchewan, e.g. the Quill and Old Wives
lakes, in regions arid enough to require no outlets. In such cases the
waters are alkaline, and contain various salts in solution which are
deposited as a white rim round the basin towards the end of the summer
when the amount of water has been greatly reduced by evaporation. It is
interesting to find maritime plants, such as the samphire, growing on
their shores a thousand miles from the sea and more than a thousand feet
above it. In many cases the lakes of Canada simply spill over at the
lowest point from one basin into the next below, making chains of lakes
with no long or well-defined channels between, since in so young a
country there h