14 ^ KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



THE IGNEOUS ROCKS OF KANSAS. 



( Prepared for the Academy in 1880, but not read until the meeting of 1881.) 

 BY ROBERT HAY, JUNCTION CITY, KANSAS. 



In the title adopted for this paper, the term "igneous rocks" is used to 

 include all rocks which owe their present structural condition in any way to 

 the agency of a high degree of heat; but we shall carefully distinguish what 

 are usually called metamorphic from those which, like trap, appear to have 

 been completely fused. 



Throughout a region including a dozen of the northeastern counties of the 

 State, there are places where huge boulders break through the even surface 

 of the prairie, or are gathered into heaps of coarse gravel. These boulders, 

 isolated or in heaps, are mostly metamorphic sandstone (quartzite), entirely 

 unlike the bed-rock of the district in which they are found. Some of them 

 still show their stratified structure distinctly by layers, and others are shown 

 to be sedimentary by containing pebbles. I have not seen or heard of any 

 that contain fossils. These rocks were undoubtedly brought here by the 

 agency of the ice of the post-tertiary period. It would seem that they were 

 brought from the archrean areas of Minnesota and British America, A few 

 miles east of Manhattan, a piece of native copper (in possession of Mrs. Dr. 

 Best, nee Little), was picked up which probably came from Lake Superior. 

 At certain places in Washington, Jackson and Douglas counties, and proba- 

 bly other places also, there are large mounds of gravel containing the prairie 

 hard-heads, and other rocks foreign to Kansas, undoubtedly brought by the 

 same glacial agency. The writer has no doubt that these mounds are terminal 

 moraines of the glacial age, and at another time may offer for consideration 

 the facts which led to this conclusion. 



The fact now of importance is, that besides the metamorphic quartzites, 

 others of the foreign rocks are of true igneous origin. We have specimens 

 of beautiful gray and red granite, of a dark hornblende rock, and a fine 

 piece of greenstone, all taken from a deposit on the bank of Elk creek, half 

 a mile north of Holton. In geologic phrase, these rocks are not in situ; or 

 in other words, they were transported to Kansas from their native region. 



As, however, they settled before Regis Loisel, and were here some scores 

 of millenniums before Coronado's explorations, they may be fairly styled 

 Kansas igneous rocks, and claim some notice in any disquisition on this 

 subject. Still, in view of the age of the rocks on which the boulders are 

 deposited, they are only new-comers — not old settlers. When they came, the 

 Kaw river had been running for long ages, carrying down cretacean sand 

 and mud to form our Gulf States. These stones are Kansans, precisely as we 

 are. They are emigrants come from afar. 



