sea. Forces of inconceivable magnitude moved through the mass. The
outer surface of the globe as it cooled ripped and shrivelled like a
withering orange. Great ridges, the mountain chains of to-day, were
furrowed on its skin. Here in the darkness of the prehistoric night
there arose as the oldest part of the surface of the earth the great
rock bed that lies in a huge crescent round the shores of Hudson Bay,
from Labrador to the unknown wilderness of the barren lands of the
Coppermine basin touching the Arctic sea. The wanderer who stands
to-day in the desolate country of James Bay or Ungava is among the
oldest monuments of the world. The rugged rock which here and there
breaks through the thin soil of the infertile north has lain on the
spot from the very dawn of time. Millions of years have probably
elapsed since the cooling of the outer crust of the globe produced the
solid basis of our continents.

The ancient formation which thus marks the beginnings of the solid
surface of the globe is commonly called by geologists the Archaean
rock, and the myriads of uncounted years during which it slowly took
shape are called the Archaean age. But the word 'Archaean' itself tells
us nothing, being merely a Greek term meaning 'very old.' This Archaean
or original rock must necessarily have extended all over the surface of
our sphere as it cooled from its molten form and contracted into the
earth on which we live. But in most places this rock lies deep under
the waters of the oceans, or buried below the heaped up strata of the
formations which the hand of time piled thickly upon it. Only here and
there can it still be seen as surface rock or as rock that lies but a
little distance below the soil. 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