THE QUESTION OF A FUNDAMENTAL GNEISS
Ever since A. C. Lawson[107] showed in Canada how the Laurentian gneiss had invaded and swallowed up the overlying Huronian rocks, suspicion began to fall on the doctrine of a "fundamental" gneiss. We may now well ask ourselves the following questions:—
(i) Was there a time in the early history of our globe when schists and gneisses were deposited as a prevalent type of sediment, under conditions which have not since recurred?
(ii) If so, which of the characters of these pre-Cambrian rocks are original, and which have been acquired through subsequent metamorphism?
(iii) On the other hand, is the prevalence of gneiss and schist in early pre-Cambrian groups of rock due to the fact that, the older the rock, the more metamorphism, by recurrent heat and pressure, it is likely to have undergone?
(iv) We may prefer the theory of Laplace, that the earth is cooling from a molten state; or the planetesimal theory, according to which heat has been developed during the consolidation and contraction of an agglomerate of solid particles; yet in either case we must admit that the earth's outer layers were once nearer to the heated parts of the earth than they are now. Is it not likely, then, that early sediments became frequently immersed in baths of molten matter, and that contact-metamorphism and admixture on a regional scale have produced in them the characters that have been attributed to a fundamental gneiss[108]?
J. J. Sederholm[109] has traced in Finland four groups of Archæan sedimentary material, which have been successively invaded by granite from the depths. The bare wave-swept isles of Spikarna, east of Hangö, serve as models of structures that are traceable throughout the Baltic lands. The more we regard the oldest gneisses of one region after another, the more we see in them igneous matter that has attempted to assimilate sediments of still older date. The banded structures that have been appealed to as indicating the power of earth-movements to deform the solid crystalline crust prove, in very many cases, to record the foliation of rocks that were already metamorphosed before the igneous matter spread among them. In some of these cases, this foliation followed planes of original stratification, and we are forced to conclude that true sedimentary structure may after all control the features of a gnarled and contorted fundamental gneiss. We are still far from discovering the primitive crust formed about a molten globe, and the brilliant proofs of evolution in the organic world are unmatched by any evidence of the evolution of rock-types during geological time.