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Updated: June 21, 2025
Imagine a region of low archaean hills, extending one thousand miles each way, subjected for thousands of years to a continual succession of glaciers, crushing, grinding, planing, smoothing, ripping up and smoothing again, carrying off whole ranges of broken hills, in fragments, to dump them at some other point, grind them again while there, and then push and hustle them out of that region into some other a few hundred miles farther; there again to tumble and grind them together, pack them into the hollows, and dump them in pyramidal piles on plains and uplands.
That vast interior sea that in Archaean times stretched from the rudimentary Appalachian Mountains to the rudimentary Rocky Mountains, and which is now the heart of the continent, would still have been a part of the primordial ocean.
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.
"The hills are shadows and they flow From form to form and nothing stands, They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go." But some hills flow much faster than others. Hills made up of the latest or newest formations seem to take to themselves wings the fastest. The Archaean hills and mountains, how slowly they melt away!
The penetrating gaze followed the pigmy vessel as it dipped to the larger stretch of the bay, dwindling with the glint of two blades that flashed with clock-like regularity in the afternoon sun. Soon it reduced to a speck and was out of sight. Clark turned to his office, still contemplating the dignity of his visitor, the stark simplicity of this archaean aristocrat.
The very few fossils we find in the upper Archaean rocks are so similar to those we shall discuss in the next chapter that we may disregard them, and the seams of carbon-shales, iron-ore, and limestone, suggest only, at the most, that life was already abundant. We must turn elsewhere for some information on the origin and early development of life.
At the close of this epoch, however, the Algonkian strata had been eroded almost away, owing to its tilted condition, so that in some places even the surface of the Archaean was exposed, and suffered the planing-down process.
All this is of historic record in stony cypher of geology indelibly engraved by time on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as traceable from the primordial archaean to our present era, the age of man.
If the first be conceived as comprising sixteen million years a very moderate estimate the second will be found to cover less than eight million years, the third less than three million years, and the fourth, the Age of Man, much less than one million years; while the Archaean Age was probably as long as all these put together.
And all this, to say nothing of the vast amount of rock, in some places a mile or two in thickness, that has been eroded from the land surfaces of the globe in later geological time, and now lies buried in the seas and lakes, we are told, is the contribution of those detached portions of Archaean rock that first rose above the primordial seas.
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