CHAPTER ly. 
THE PRE-ARCHH^AN WORLD. 
Although in most of the rocks of the Archaean 
period the traces of stratification are completely oblit¬ 
erated, there is no doubt that they were laid in strata, 
and, of course, by water. The Archaean areas must, 
then, have been under the sea; and in some region, 
not known now, there must have been areas of land 
above the sea from which materials to make the rocks 
could have been taken. Where was this pre-Archaean 
continent? Was it about the Horth Pole? It is 
reasonable to suppose so, as the first rocks are found 
in the northern end of the continent about the pole; 
besides, Horth America, as well as the British Isles and 
Europe, were formed from the north toward the south. 
But what was there before the Archaean period ? 
In what condition was the earth ? Geology can take 
us no farther back; we must ask the astronomer and 
the physicist. They are not slow to inform us that the 
cold world was once a red-hot molten globe; that all 
the rocks flowed like molten iron; that the water now 
in our seas, rocks, rivers, and in our plants and animal 
bodies was a dense envelope of steam and mist about 
the earth; that the globe gradually cooled, so that a 
crust began to form on its surface like cakes of ice 
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