Mineral wealth of the pre-Cambrian rocks.  The pre-Cambrian rocks are of very great economic importance, because of their extensive metamorphism and the enormous masses of igneous rock which they involve.  In many parts of the country they are the source of supply of granite, gneiss, marble, slate, and other such building materials.  Still more valuable are the stores of iron and copper and other metals which they contain.

At the present time the pre-Cambrian region about Lake Superior leads the world in the production of iron ore, its output for 1903 being more than five sevenths of the entire output of the whole United States, and exceeding that of any foreign country.  The ore bodies consist chiefly of the red oxide of iron (hematite) and occur in troughs of the strata, underlain by some impervious rock.  A theory held by many refers the ultimate source of the iron to the igneous rocks of the Archean.  When these rocks were upheaved and subjected to weathering, their iron compounds were decomposed.  Their iron was leached out and carried away to be laid in the Algonkian water bodies in beds of iron carbonate and other iron compounds.  During the later ages, after the Algonkian strata had been uplifted to form part of the continent, a second concentration has taken place.  Descending underground waters charged with oxygen have decomposed the iron carbonate and deposited the iron, in the form of iron oxide, in troughs of the strata where their downward progress was arrested by impervious floors.

The pre-Cambrian rocks of the eastern United States also are rich in iron.  In certain districts, as in the Highlands of New Jersey, the black oxide of iron (magnetite) is so abundant in beds and disseminated grains that the ordinary surveyor’s compass is useless.

The pre-Cambrian copper mines of the Lake Superior region are among the richest on the globe.  In the igneous rocks copper, next to iron, is the most common of all the useful metals, and it was especially abundant in the Keweenawan lavas.  After the Keweenawan was uplifted to form land, percolating waters leached out much of the copper diffused in the lava sheets and deposited it within steam blebs as amygdules of native copper, in cracks and fissures, and especially as a cement, or matrix, in the interbedded gravels which formed the chief aquifers of the region.  The famous Calumet and Hecla mine follows down the dip of the strata to the depth of nearly a mile and works such an ancient conglomerate whose matrix is pure copper.

The appearance of life.  Sometime during the dim ages preceding the Cambrian, whether in the Archean or in the Algonkian we know not, occurred one of the most important events in the history of the earth.  Life appeared for the first time upon the planet.  Geology has no evidence whatever to offer as to whence or how life came.  All analogies lead us to believe that its appearance must have been sudden.  Its earliest forms are unknown, but analogy suggests that as every living creature has developed from a single cell, so the earliest organisms upon the globe—­the germs from which all later life is supposed to have been evolved—­were tiny, unicellular masses of protoplasm, resembling the amoeba of to-day in the simplicity of their structure.