86 LABRADOR 
vast group of rocks forming the staple material of the Lab- 
rador coast by a name confessing at once some knowledge 
and muchignorance. 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 
