SECTION III., 1886. FE | Trans. Roy. Soc. CANADA. 
I1.—The Genetic History of Crystalline Rocks. 
By T. Sterry Hunt, M.A., LL.D. (Cantab.) 
(Read in abstract, May 25, 1886.) 
§ 1. Ina preceding essay on the the Origin of Crystalline Rocks,’ we have considered 
at length the different views hitherto maintained as to the mode of their production, and 
have set forth what we have called the “crenitic hypothesis.” It is proposed in the follow- 
ing pages to examine still farther the new hypothesis in some of its aspects, to show how 
far the conception of a single consolidated igneous mass under the combined action of 
water and heat may be made to explain satisfactorily the various facts in the history of 
the earth’s crystalline crust, and thus to reconcile many of the contradictions which still 
divide the geological world as to the relations of stratified and massive crystalline rocks. 
Hence the title of the present essay. 
Of the great divisions adopted by the Wernerian school in geology, those of Primary 
and Secondary correspond respectively to Original and Derived rocks, and were supposed 
to represent earlier and later periods in geologic time; the name of “Transition” being 
applied to the rocks of an intermediate period, believed to mark the passage from the 
conditions of the Primary to those of the Secondary age. The name of “Tertiary” given 
to the rocks of a still later age, and marking a subsequent period in the process of deriva- 
tion, needs no explanation. By the geologists of the Huttonian school the rocks, called 
“Primary ” or “Original” by the Wernerians, were imagined to be in many, if not in all 
cases, Secondary or Derived rocks, the materials of which, got from the disintegration of 
preéxisting masses, had been arranged by water, and subsequently transformed by combined 
mechanical and chemical agencies into their present crystalline condition ; in accordance 
with which hypothesis they have been called “ Metamorphic” rocks. By rejecting, as their 
master Hutton had done, all “inquiry into the first origin of things,” or “the commence- 
ment or termination of the present order,” and by teaching that the rocks, called by Wer- 
nerians “ Primary” and “Transition,” were for the most part, if not wholly, metamorphosed 
portions of derived rocks, which themselves, in their prolongation into other regions, 
could be recognized as Secondary or as Tertiary strata, the Huttonians have sought to des- 
troy the chronological value of the Wernerian terminology. With the abandonment of the 
Huttonian or so-called “metamorphic ” doctrine, now shown to be false, so far at least as 

1 A paper was presented to this Society by the writer, in May, 1885, with the title of “The Geognosy of Crystal- 
line Rocks,” and was accepted for publication in the Transactions, but subsequently withdrawn. In the abstract 
of the paper then read, and afterwards published in the Canadian Record of Science, the phenomena of stratification, 
alike in endogenous veinstones and in eruptive rocks, were discussed with reference both to the crenitic process and 
to the hypothesis of eliquation. The present paper is, under a new title, an extension and development of that of 
last year. 
? Trans. Roy. Soc, Can., Vol. ii. Sec. iii. pp. 1-67. 
