148 
tempting to show that they had been pressed out of their 
| globoid shape, flattened, elongated, curved into 
sickle-blades, and otherwise distorted, like fossil shells in 
semi-metamorphic rocks. 
The opinion was expressed that this process might be 
found to have been carried on in all rocks, to an extent only 
limited by their degree of metamorphism. Of course the 
few geologists present at the meeting were not prepared to 
recognize the fact of such distortion in the evidently water- 
worn slaty pebbles laid before them as specimens. Nor will 
any geologist, I believe, who may have had a large experi- 
ence solely among the conglomerate outcrops of No. IV., No. 
X., and No. XII. of the Paleozoic system, consent to this 
hypothesis of quartz distortion for an instant. I venture to 
assert that among millions of pebbles taken from the coal 
measure, or even from the middle silurian mountains, there 
cannot be discovered one bearing the marks of such distor- 
tion; although many of them offer plainly enough the evi- 
dences of wear and tear by fracture and the sliding of one 
stratum of the rock upon the other. 
But if the geologist who has lived among unmetamor- 
. phosed conglomerates shall enlarge his experience by pass- 
ing over into such a region as Vermont, where every magne- 
become either steatite, serpentine, tale-slate or 
dolomite, where every argillaceous clay has been changed 
into pholarite, or roofing-slate, and every sandstone into 
‘quartzite, he may come to listen more patiently to Hitch- 
cock’s theorem, — that gneiss is nothing more nor less than 
metamorphosed old conglomerates, wherein the pebbles have 
___ been pressed into laminz: composed of sections of the original 
_ ‘Matrix, themselves also pressed flat and thin. It is a bold 
_ assertion. It will demand abundant proof. The microscope 
2 ene ee —— 
