The moral of these statements of fact is that the imperfections of the record will yield only to patient and painstaking work, and that much is in the power of local amateurs. I would enforce this last statement by a reference to a little research, in which I have happened to take part at a summer resort on the Lower St. Lawrence, at which I have from time to time spent a few restful vacation weeks. Little Metis is on the Quebec Group of Sir William Logan, that peculiar local representative of the lower part of the Cambro-Silurian and Upper Cambrian formations which stretches along the south side of the St. Lawrence all the way from Quebec to Cape Rosier, near Gaspé, a distance of five hundred miles. This great series of rocks is a jumble of deposits belonging at that early time to the marginal area of what is now the American continent, and indicating the action not merely of ordinary causes of aqueous deposit, but of violent volcanic ejections, accompanied perhaps by earthquake waves, and not improbably by the action of heavy coast ice. The result is that mud rocks now in the form of black, grey, and red shales and slates alternate with thick and irregular beds of hard sandstone, sometimes so coarse that it resembles the angular _débris_ of the first treatment of quartz in a crusher. With these sandstones are thick and still more irregular conglomerates formed of pebbles and boulders of all sizes, up to several feet in diameter, some of which are of older limestones containing Cambrian fossils, while others are of quartzite or of igneous or volcanic rocks. The whole formation, as presented at Metis, is of the most unpromising character as regards fossils, and after visiting the place for ten years, and taking many long walks along the shore and into the interior, and scrutinising every exposure, I had found nothing more interesting than a few fragments of graptolites, little zoophytes, ancient representatives of our sea mosses, and which are quite characteristic of several portions of the Quebec Group. With these were some marks of fucoids and tracks or burrows of worms. The explorers of the Geological Survey had been equally unsuccessful.