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An Estray Wreck.—One of the most useful features of the monthly "Pilot Charts," published by the Hydrographic Office of the Navy Department, is the series comprising tracings of the courses of derelict vessels. It is said that between twenty-five and forty-five of these peripatetic dangers to navigation are recorded every month in the North Atlantic alone, and the supply is constantly kept up by the fruits of every great storm. Their wanderings are often very eccentric. Thus the W. L. White, a lumber-laden three-masted schooner, having been abandoned off Delaware Bay during the blizzard of March, 1888, started off to the southward under the influence of the inshore current and the north-west gale. Upon reaching the Gulf Stream she turned away to the eastward and began her long cruise toward Europe, directly in the track of thousands of vessels; drifting blindly about at the mercy of wind and current. During the former part of her wandering she followed a course about east-north-east, at an average rate of about thirty-two miles a day. From the beginning of May till the end of October she pursued an extraordinarily zigzag course, seesawing back and forth, and doubling upon herself, "staggering like a drunken man all over a comparatively small area, a constant menace to navigation in its most frequented ground." After escaping from this snarl, she moved east and northeast, 1,260 miles in eighty-four days, or an average of about fifteen miles a day. Finally, on the 23d of January, 1889, she was stranded on one of the islands of the Hebrides after a cruise of ten months and ten days, in which she traversed a distance of more than five thousand miles, and was reported forty-five times; while many more vessels may have passed dangerously near her at night or during thick weather.
The Canadian Lakes and the Glaciers.—In accounting for the origin of the great lake basins in Canada, Dr. Robert Bell regards Lake Superior as of volcanic origin, and Hudson Bay as having some points in common with it; while Athabasca, the Great Slave Lake, Lake Winnipeg, the Georgian Bay, and Lake Ontario, lie along the line where the limestones and sandstones meet the older Laurentian and Huronian strata, and were probably excavated by post-tertiary glaciers. Dr. Bell also points out that dikes of greenstones, etc., often formed the original lines along which the channels of rivers, arms of lakes, and fiords, were cut by denuding forces. Prof. A. T. Drummond suggests that the glaciers have been called upon to do too much work. There is difficulty in accepting the theory of such colossal glacial systems as geologists invoke. The vast effects of erosion by atmospheric and other agencies in Miocene and Pliocene ages which immediately preceded the Glacial epoch, and the great deposits of decomposed rock which must have accumulated during those ages, have been overlooked. The continental glacier, even if only a mile in thickness, of the extent demanded by the theory, would represent a depth of about five hundred or six hundred feet taken uniformly everywhere from the waters of the ocean and transformed into ice. The withdrawal of such a mass of water from the North Atlantic would have carried our coast-line from seventy-five to one hundred miles seaward, would have rendered the Gulf of St. Lawrence dry land and brought the Great Banks of Newfoundland to the surface, and would have obliterated the German Ocean. Are we prepared to ac-
