I caught cold some several million years ago and I haven't got over it yet. That's why I'm a granite pebble instead of a slate pebble, or a sandstone pebble, or anything common. It's a part of the story of the fairyland of change, this cold of mine.
Ahem!
Would you mind getting me a lump of sugar? I don't want it for my cold—it never does that any good—but because a lump of sugar goes so well with this part of my story.
You notice the sugar lump is made up of little crystals, little building blocks just as I am, just as all granites are. And the crystals in the sugar and in the stone were made in the same way—by first heating and then cooling the material out of which they are made.
THE CRYSTAL FAIRIES IN THE SUGAR-BOWL]
When the earth's surface first cooled, the melted rock is supposed to have changed to granite. Melted rock, under the same conditions, does that to-day. So, for a while, granite must have been all the kind of rock there was. There was as yet no sandstone, no shells or bones to make limestone, no pebbles to help make conglomerate or "pudding stone," no ground-up rock and soil to make slate.
The rocks of the earth have been made over so many times that it is not probable that any of the granites now "living" (so to speak) are the same rocks that were made when the earth first cooled, but you can see that we have a right to say what I was careful to say when I introduced myself to you in the first chapter, that we belong to one of the very oldest families—we Granites.
Ahem!
There is a variety of rock—a crystallized rock—with bands all through it, called gneiss (say "nice"). Gneiss is made from all kinds of rock including, of course, conglomerate; that is to say "pudding stone"[16] warmed over.