Here, however, a more modern feature attracts our attention. The sides of the bounding hills are cut in a succession of terraces, rising one above another from the level of the sea to a height of 500 feet or more, capped with long ranges of the white houses and barns of the Canadian habitants, and furnishing level lines for the "concession roads" which run along the coast. These terraces are really old sea margins indicating the stages of the elevation of the land out of the sea immediately before the modern period. On these terraces, and in the clays and sands which form the plateaus extending in some places in front of them, are sea shells of the same kinds with those now living in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and occasionally we find bones of whales which have been stranded on the old beaches.
These terraces are, of course, indications of change of level in very modern times. They show that in what we call the Pleistocene age the land was lower than at present, and we shall find that in the Lower St. Lawrence there is evidence of a depression extending to over 1,000 feet, carrying the sea far up the valley, so that sea shells are found in the clays as far up as Kingston and Ottawa, and stranded skeletons of whales as far west as Smith's Falls, in Ontario.
If we examine the shores more minutely, we shall find all along the south coast a belt of boulders which are often as much as eight to ten feet in diameter, and consist largely of rocks found only in the hills of the northern coast, more than thirty miles distant, from which they must have been drifted to their present position. This boulder belt, which extends from the lowest tide mark about fifty feet or more upward, is sometimes piled in ridges and sometimes flattened out into a rude pavement. It is a product of the modern field ice, which, attaining a great thickness in winter, has boulders frozen into its bottom, and floating up and down with the tide, deposits these on the shore. At Little Metis, two hundred miles below Quebec, where I have a summer residence, I have from year to year cleared a passage through the boulder belt for bathing and for launching boats, and nearly every spring I find that boulders have been thrown into the cleared space by the ice, while one can notice from year to year differences in the position of very large boulders.