n 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 co