In Canada, more than anywhere else in
the world, is this Archaean formation seen. On a geological
map it is marked as extending all round the basin of
Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the shores of the Arctic.
It covers the whole of the country which we call New
Ontario, and also the upper part of the province of
Quebec. Outside of this territory there was at the dawn
of time no other 'land' where North America now is, except
a long island of rock that marks the backbone of what
are now the Selkirk Mountains and a long ridge that is
now the mountain chain of the Alleghanies beside the
Atlantic slope.
Books on geology trace out for us the long successive
periods during which the earth's surface was formed. Even
in the Archaean age something in the form of life may
have appeared. Perhaps vast masses of dank seaweed
germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming
oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and
breaking at its rock formation and distributing it in
new strata, each buried beneath the next and holding fast
within it the fossilized remains that form the record of
its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds
in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in
vast beds of decaying vegetation that form the coal-fields
of to-day.
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