Note 92 — PETER KALM’s TRAVELS. (continued 2)

In the afternoon we went to see another vein, which had been spoken of as silver ore. It lies about a quarter of a mile to the north-east of bay St. Paul, near a point of land called Cap au Corbeau, close to the shore of the river St. Lawrence. The mountain in which these veins ly, consist of a pale red vitrescent spar, a black glimmer, a pale lime-stone, purple or garnet-coloured grains of quartz, and some transparent quartz. Sometimes the reddish vitrescent spar is the most abundant, and lies in long stripes of small hard grains. Sometimes the fine black glimmer abounds more than the remaining constituent parts; and these two last kinds of stone generally run in alternate stripes. The white lime-stone which consists of almost invisible particles, is mixed in among them. The garnet-coloured quartz grains appear here and there, and sometimes form whole stripes. They are as big as pin’s heads, round, shining, and strike fire with steel. All these stones are very hard, and the mountains near the sea, consist entirely of them. They sometimes ly in almost perpendicular strata, of ten or fifteen inches thickness. The strata, however, point with their upper ends to the north-west, and go upwards from the river, as if the water, which is close to the south-east side of the mountains, had forced the strata to lean on that side. These mountains contain very narrow veins of a white, and sometimes of a greenish, fine, semidiaphanous, soft spar, which crumbles easily into grains. In this spar they very frequently find specks, which look like a calamine blend92. Now and then, and but very seldom, there is a grain of lead-ore. The mountains near the shore consist sometimes of a black fine-grained horn-stone, and a ferruginous lime-stone. The horn-stone in that case is always in three or four times as great a quantity as the lime-stone.