THE PRIMEVAL AMERICAN CONTINENT. 235 



ondary deposits. The Norian rock is distinguished by the abundance 

 of labradorite, a feldspar possessing iridescent tints, and is found in 

 Essex County, New York, Labrador, extensively along the St. Law- 

 rence, upon Lake Huron, while " bowlders of it are occasionally found 

 along the eastern shores of Maine and Massachusetts, and also in north- 

 ern New Jersey." 



The Huronian era succeeds, and is a name applied to the upper 

 layers of the Huron Mountains, Lake Superior, to the Green Mountain 

 series, and to detached areas along the coast of Newfoundland, east- 

 ern New England, and southward upon the flanks of the Blue Ridge. 

 The Mont Alban series marks the fourth period, so named after the 

 White Mountain layers in New Hampshire, where the aggregated dis- 

 play of crystalline schist is assigned to this province. New York, 

 Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington occupy this terrain, and 

 these rocks occur throughout the Blue Ridge, as far as Georgia, of 

 more than passing significance, as they form the gold-bearing strata 

 ia Virginia, North and South Carolina. Li these rocks the garnet, 

 staurolite, cyanite, and chiastolite, favorites of the mineralogist, are 

 almost exclusively found. 



Instinctively we ask: Did no living thing exist through all these 

 ages ; did the mechanical wear and tear of rock-masses and their rede- 

 position by mechanical means solely occupy the desolate centuries? 

 The proofs of organic activity, involving the functions of life, are nu- 

 merous, but the exact character of that life and the special conditions 

 under which it flourished are greatly if not entirely wanting. In the 

 first place, we find in Canada important, indeed inexhaustible deposits 

 of carbon under the form of graphite, and graphite occurs in our coal- 

 measures as the direct product of alteration from coal. These huge 

 masses, distributed in pockets, sheets, and nodules through the archsean 

 rock, indicate the presence of vegetative forces, doubtless exhibited in 

 plants of a low order, but on a scale of troj^ical exuberance. 



These carbon pockets occupy the shrunken areas of what were once 

 vast, waving, and deeply matted beds of algae, sea-weeds, building up, 

 through innumerable generations amid the gathered detritus of shore 

 and cliff, dense piles of carbonaceous remains. Or else they are attrib- 

 utable to a fertile growth of lichens which spread, possibly with an 

 almost arborescent vigor, over plain and mountain. These organisms 

 are low in the vegetable hierarchy, and along with them may have 

 lived allied families : the microscopic Desmids and Diatoms, whose 

 siliceous tests showered down through the still oceans ; beside them 

 the Corallines and Nullipores, forming calcareous fringes and coral-like 

 thickets ; the minute Protophytes and the delicate Charae. Doubtless 

 this age marked the climax of these plants, and, through multiplied 

 species and in vast numbers, they represented one phase of the ever- 

 restless evolution of vital forces. 



The great deposits of iron-ore, though affording no direct evidence 



