At low tide the Rock is separated from Mount Joli by a narrow sand-bar. Denys believed they had once been united by an arch, and this is confirmed by savants who find geologic relation between the two. Structurally the Percé cliffs, gullies and mountain crests are of immemorial origin. Geologists come here to fathom principles of the earth's tissues, to learn from scarred surfaces by what processes this primordial coast attained its disparate forms. The beach facing the Rock is a source of limitless instruction and amusement. Here are stones mottled red and purple, tipped and barred with white, streaked with chocolate, ruled like a chessboard, spangled with lime crystals. The boulders heaped about the base of Mount Joli present profuse examples of rock texture and stratification. Occasionally a split stone is found bearing the imprint of a fossil or the fragment of a petrified vertebrate. Dr. Clarke, Curator of the New York State Museum at Albany and a scientist especially versed in the wonders of the Gaspé coastal formation,[1] was one day searching this beach when he casually tapped with his hammer a large cobble. What was his elation to disclose in its petrified bed an unblemished specimen, seventeen inches long, of a trilobite, "great-
- ↑ The Gaspé region is geologically related to New York State. See The Heart of Gaspé, by J. M. Clarke, and the Memoir prepared by Dr. Clarke for the New York State Educational Department, Early Devonic History of New York and Eastern Canada.
