86 LABRADOR 



vast group of rocks forming the staple material of the Lab- 

 rador coast by a name confessing at once some knowledge 

 and much ignorance. The Archean formations compose the 

 foundation on which the Continent of North America has 

 been built. Resting upon its ancient surface are the 

 rock-beds bearing the skeleton remains of the earliest 

 known organisms, and upon those beds have been accumu- 

 lated in turn the limestones, shales, sandstones, conglom- 

 erates, and lavas, which make up most of the continent. 

 That is one of the main facts known about the Archean, 

 it is a basement formation. Another fact, no less certain, 

 no less important, is that the Archean is complex in its 

 composition, in its structure, and in its history. Let us, 

 then, call these old rocks by their time-honoured name, " the 

 Basement Complex." 



Here and there on the earth the younger, covering rocks 

 have been swept away by age-long weathering and wasting, 

 and the ancient foundation has been exposed to the air. 

 Nowhere on the earth is so great a continuous area of the 

 Archean to be found as in eastern Canada. From Lake 

 Winnipeg to the Atlantic, and from the St. Lawrence and 

 Ottawa rivers northward to the Arctic, the Basement 

 Complex, still locally bearing on its back patches of the 

 younger rocks, forms a rolling, timber-covered plateau, 

 which amazes every explorer who compares the simplicity of 

 its present-day relief with the infinite turmoil through which 

 its constituent rocks have passed. These rocks are almost 

 entirely crystalline gneisses, schists, marbles, coarser 

 crystalline limestones, and granitic rocks of endless variety 

 - agreeing, however, in the telling of a common story, that 

 the Complex is the remnant of enormous mountain-systems 



