GEOLOGY AND SCENERY OF NORTHEAST COAST 9Q1 
were unquestionably the conditions under which the old 
Archean chain of Labrador was upheaved. 
As we have seen, enormous lateral pressure, pressure too 
great to be comprehended by the human mind, ridged up 
the rocks to alpine heights. During that process much of 
the crystallization and recrystallization of the Archean 
rocks took place. It was, therefore, natural that the min- 
erals of the rocks should be arranged with reference to the 
pressure. They might be expected to lie in the rock with 
their longer axes perpendicular to the lines of force, assum- 
ing thus the position offering greatest resistance to that 
force. This is the case for probably much the largest area 
of rock in the coastal belt. Many granites and allied rocks 
which had been “intruded,” in the molten state, into the 
base of the range, were squeezed by the continued appli- 
cation of the same mountain-building forces, and their 
minerals, too, have been crushed and driven into alignment 
at right angles to the direction of pressure. So it has come 
about that the commonest rocks found on the coast are 
what are called “crystalline schists’: gneisses, which are 
like granite in composition but show on the broken surface 
the parallelism of the minerals; mica schists, with the same 
(schistose) structure, yet lacking the white or pink feldspar 
erystals of gneiss; hornblende schists, in which the familiar 
mica is replaced by the less familiar but likewise important 
mineral, hornblende; and a large number of other rock- 
species of similar structure. 
The nature of the original material from which the crys- 
talline schists have been made, that is, the composition 
of the earth’s crust in a mountainous region before the moun- 
tain-building began, is one of the most interesting problems 
