is so small in comparison.  In the case of our own continent we have, to begin with, about two million of square miles of Archaean rocks in detached lines and masses, rising here and there above the primordial ocean; a large triangular mass in Canada, and two broken lines of smaller masses running south from it on each side of the continent, inclosing a vast interior sea between them.  To end with, we have the finished continent of eight million or more square miles, of an average height of two thousand feet above the sea, built up or developed from and around these granite centres very much as the body is built up and around the bones, and of such prodigious weight that some of our later geologists seek to account for the continental submarine shelf that surrounds the continent on the theory that the land has slowly crept out into the sea under the pressure of its own weight.  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.  It is a greater miracle than that of the loaves and the fishes.  We have vastly more to end with than we had to begin with.  The more the rocks have been destroyed, the more they have increased; the more the waters have devoured them, the more they have multiplied and waxed strong.

Either the geologists have greatly underestimated the amount of Archaean rock above the waters at the start, or else there are factors in the problem that have not been taken into the account.  Lyell seems to have appreciated the difficulties of the problem, and, to account for the forty thousand feet of sediment deposited in Palaeozoic times in the region of the Appalachians, he presupposes a neighboring continent to the east, probably formed of Laurentian rocks, where now rolls the Atlantic.  But if such a continent once existed, would not some vestige of it still remain?  The fact that no trace of it as been found, it seems to me, invalidates Lyell’s theory.

Archaean time in geologic history answers to pre-historic time in human history; all is dark and uncertain, though we are probably safe in assuming that there was more strife and turmoil among the earth-building forces than there has ever been since.  The body of unstratified rock within the limits of North America may have been much greater than is supposed, but it seems to me impossible that it could have been anything like as massive as the continent now is.  If this had been the case there would have been no great interior sea, and no wide sea-margins in which the sediments of the stratified rocks could have been deposited.  More than four fifths of the continent is of secondary origin and shows that vast geologic eras went to the making of it.

It is equally hard to believe that the primary or igneous rocks, where they did appear, were sufficiently elevated to have furnished through erosion the all but incalculable amount of material that went to the making of our vast land areas.  But the geologists give me the impression that this is what we are to believe.