ned fortunes by the losses of their employers.

There is no doubt that immense mineral resources remain undiscovered
among the rocky solitudes of Lower Canada. Marble of excellent quality,
and endless variety of color, is found in different parts of the
country, and limestone is almost universal. Labrador produces a
beautiful and well-known spar of rich and brilliant tints, ultra-marine,
greenish yellow, red, and some of a fine pearly gray.

In Upper Canada, the country north of Lake Ontario is generally
characterized by a limestone subsoil resting on granite. The rocks about
Kingston are usually a very compact limestone, of a bluish-gray color,
having a slight silicious admixture, increasing as the depth increases,
with occasional intrusions of quartz or hornstone. The limestone strata
are horizontal, with the greatest dip when nearest to the elder rock on
which it rests; their thickness, like the depths of the soil, varies
from a few feet to a few inches: in these formations many minerals are
observed; genuine granite is seldom or never found.

West of Lake Ontario, the chasm at the Falls of Niagara shows the strata
of the country to be limestone, next slate, and lowest sandstone.
Limestone and sandstone compose the secondary formations of a large
portion of Canada, and of nearly all that vast extent of country in the
United States drained by the Mississippi. At Niagara the interposing
structure of slate is nearly forty feet thick, and fragile, like shale
crumbling away from under the limestone, thus strengthening the opinion
that there has been for many ages a continual retrocession of the Great
Falls. Around Lake St. Clair, masses of granite, mica slate, and quartz
are found in abundance. The level shores of Lake Huron offer little
geological variety; secondary limestone, filled with the usual reliquiae,
is the general structure of the coast, but detached blocks of granite
and other primitive rocks are occasionally found: this district appears
poor in minerals. The waters of Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior have
evidently, at some remote period, formed one vast sheet, which probably
burst its bounds by a sudden action of nature, and subsided into the
present divisions, all lower than the former general level: the
separating ridges of these waters are but slightly elevated; great
masses of rock and huge bowlders of granite are found rolled at least
100 miles from their original situations, and immense alluvial be