THE ARCHEAN: NOTE I. 185 
England. Though these crystalline masses were found under 
conditions of heat and fusion when it was hopeless to expect 
traces of organization, yet he would not dogmatically affirm 
that they might not contain fossils. In 1851 Foster and Whitney 
adopted the term, limiting it to those of detrital origin. At 
this time Logan, under the influence of Lyell's teaching, called 
the lower series of the Canada Survey metamorphic, but after 
1854 changed the term to Laurentian, which he applied to the 
Azoic of Foster and Whitney. Dana, first in 1862 and then in 
1871, adopted Foster and Whitney's Azoic, but included under it 
not only detrital rocks but those which constituted the first floor 
of the globe. Afterwards, in 1874, in a second edition, he 
adopted Archean time with an undefined Azoic age as its first 
term, and finally that age in which the earliest forms of plants 
and animals appeared. Foster and Whitney gave the name 
Azoic in 1850 to a body of rocks which were in part sedimentary, 
and in which no fossils were found and which everywhere under- 
lay those strata in which the earliest fossils occurred. Profs. 
Whitney and Wadsworth claim that up to the present time, 
after thirty years' work on them, no proofs of fossils have been 
furnished. Eozoon is considered of inorganic origin on the 
evidence of Mobius, Zittel, Carter, Rowney and King, and 
finally, and, as they hold, conclusively proved to be so by their 
investigations of the eozoonal structure at Stoneham, Mass., 
which they found to be in a segregated or vein-like deposit of 
earlier date than some of the disks, but posterior as to the forma- 
tion of others. They concluded that the calcareous mass was 
the result of the action of thermal waters, etc. At Chelmsford 
the eozoonal limestone was entirely crystalline, and filled with 
Scapolite, actinolite and other silicates. Similar conditions ap- 
plied to the limestone at Devil's Den and Devil's Basin. The 
notion that those coral-like bodies and rhizopod masses resembling 
Stromatopora found by Dr. Geo. W. Hawes in the massive chloritic 
rocks of New Hampshire were organic, which Sir J. W. Daw- 
son pronounced like parts of Bryozoans, Entoraostracans, and 
some Devonian plants, was abandoned by Dr. Hawes himself two 
years later. 
The evidence of limestone as to the existence of organic life 
is rejected because carbon as graphite can exist in iron, and is 
found in the iron and the basaltic rock of Greenland. In oppo- 
