GRANTOWN, the capital of Speyside, Elginshire, Scotland. Pop. (1901) 1568. It lies on the left bank of the Spey, 23¼ m. S. of Forres by the Highland railway, with a station on the Great North of Scotland’s Speyside line connecting Craigellachie with Boat of Garten. It was founded in 1776 by Sir James Grant of Grant, and became the chief seat of that ancient family, who had lived on their adjoining estate of Freuchie (Gaelic, fraochach, “heathery”) since the beginning of the 15th century, and hence were usually described as the lairds of Freuchie. The public buildings include the town hall, court house and orphan hospital; and the industries are mainly connected with the cattle trade and the distilling of whisky. The town, built of grey granite, presents a handsome appearance, and being delightfully situated in the midst of the most beautiful pine and birch woods in Scotland, with pure air and a bracing climate, is an attractive resort. Castle Grant, immediately to the north, is the principal mansion of the earl of Seafield, the head of the Clan Grant. In a cave, still called “Lord Huntly’s Cave,” in a rocky glen in the vicinity, George, marquess of Huntly, lay hid during Montrose’s campaign in 1644-45.
GRANULITE (Lat. granulum, a little grain), a name used by petrographers to designate two distinct classes of rocks. According to the terminology of the French school it signifies a granite in which both kinds of mica (muscovite and biotite) occur, and corresponds to the German Granit, or to the English “muscovite biotite granite.” This application has not been accepted generally. To the German petrologists “granulite” means a more or less banded fine-grained metamorphic rock, consisting mainly of quartz and felspar in very small irregular crystals, and containing usually also a fair number of minute rounded pale-red garnets. Among English and American geologists the term is generally employed in this sense. The granulites are very closely allied to the gneisses, as they consist of nearly the same minerals, but they are finer grained, have usually less perfect foliation, are more frequently garnetiferous, and have some special features of microscopic structure. In the rocks of this group the minerals, as seen in a microscopic slide, occur as small rounded grains forming a mosaic closely fitted together. The individual crystals have never perfect form, and indeed rarely any traces of it. In some granulites they interlock, with irregular borders; in others they have been drawn out and flattened into tapering lenticles by crushing. In most cases they are somewhat rounded with smaller grains between the larger. This is especially true of the quartz and felspar which are the predominant minerals; mica always appears as flat scales (irregular or rounded but not hexagonal). Both muscovite and biotite may be present and vary considerably in abundance; very commonly they have their flat sides parallel and give the rock a rudimentary schistosity, and they may be aggregated into bands—in which case the granulites are indistinguishable from certain varieties of gneiss. The garnets are very generally larger than the above-mentioned ingredients, and easily visible with the eye as pink spots on the broken surfaces of the rock. They usually are filled with enclosed grains of the other minerals.
The felspar of the granulites is mostly orthoclase or cryptoperthite; microcline, oligoclase and albite are also common. Basic felspars occur only rarely. Among accessory minerals, in addition to apatite, zircon, and iron oxides, the following may be mentioned: hornblende (not common), riebeckite (rare), epidote and zoisite, calcite, sphene, andalusite, sillimanite, kyanite, hercynite (a green spinel), rutile, orthite and tourmaline. Though occasionally we may find larger grains of felspar, quartz or epidote, it is more characteristic of these rocks that all the minerals are in small, nearly uniform, imperfectly shaped individuals.
On account of the minuteness with which it has been described and the important controversies on points of theoretical geology which have arisen regarding it, the granulite district of Saxony (around Rosswein, Penig, &c.) may be considered the typical region for rocks of this group. It should be remembered that though granulites are probably the commonest rocks of this country, they are mingled with granites, gneisses, gabbros, amphibolites, mica schists and many other petrographical types. All of these rocks show more or less metamorphism either of a thermal character or due to pressure and crushing. The granites pass into gneiss and granulite; the gabbros into flaser gabbro and amphibolite; the slates often contain andalusite or chiastolite, and show transitions to mica schists. At one time these rocks were regarded as Archean gneisses of a special type. Johannes Georg Lehmann propounded the hypothesis that their present state was due principally to crushing acting on them in a solid condition, grinding them down and breaking up their minerals, while the pressure to which they were subjected welded them together into coherent rock. It is now believed, however, that they are comparatively recent and include sedimentary rocks, partly of Palaeozoic age, and intrusive masses which may be nearly massive or may have gneissose, flaser or granulitic structures. These have been developed largely by the injection of semi-consolidated highly viscous intrusions, and the varieties of texture are original or were produced very shortly after the crystallization of the rocks. Meanwhile, however, Lehmann’s advocacy of post-consolidation crushing as a factor in the development of granulites has been so successful that the terms granulitization and granulitic structures are widely employed to indicate the results of dynamometamorphism acting on rocks at a period long after their solidification.
The Saxon granulites are apparently for the most part igneous and correspond in composition to granites and porphyries. There are, however, many granulites which undoubtedly were originally sediments (arkoses, grits and sandstones). A large part of the highlands of Scotland consists of paragranulites of this kind, which have received the group name of “Moine gneisses.”
Along with the typical acid granulites above described, in Saxony, India, Scotland and other countries there occur dark-coloured basic granulites (“trap granulites”). These are fine-grained rocks, not usually banded, nearly black in colour with small red spots of garnet. Their essential minerals are pyroxene, plagioclase and garnet: chemically they resemble the gabbros. Green augite and hypersthene form a considerable part of these rocks, they may contain also biotite, hornblende and quartz. Around the garnets there is often a radial grouping of small grains of pyroxene and hornblende in a clear matrix of felspar: these “centric” structures are frequent in granulites. The rocks of this group accompany gabbro and serpentine, but the exact conditions under which they are formed and the significance of their structures is not very clearly understood.
(J. S. F.)
GRANVELLA, ANTOINE PERRENOT, Cardinal de (1517-1586), one of the ablest and most influential of the princes of the church during the great political and ecclesiastical movements which immediately followed the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, was born on the 20th of August 1517 at Besançon, where his father, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvella (1484-1550), who afterwards became chancellor of the empire under Charles V., was practising as a lawyer. Later Nicolas held an influential position in the Netherlands, and from 1530 until his death he was one of the emperor’s most trusted advisers in Germany. On the completion of his studies in law at Padua and in divinity at Louvain, Antoine held a canonry at Besançon, but he was promoted to the bishopric of Arras when barely twenty-three (1540). In his episcopal capacity he attended several diets of the empire, as well as the opening meetings of the council of Trent; and the influence of his father, now chancellor, led to his being entrusted with many difficult and delicate pieces of public business, in the execution of which he developed a rare talent for diplomacy, and at the same time acquired an intimate acquaintance with most of the currents of European politics. One of his specially noteworthy performances was the settlement of the terms of peace after the defeat of the league of Schmalkalden at Mühlberg in 1547, a settlement in which, to say the least, some particularly sharp practice was exhibited. In 1550 he succeeded his father in the office of secretary of state; in this capacity he attended Charles in the war with Maurice, elector of Saxony, accompanied him in the flight from Innsbruck, and afterwards drew up the treaty of Passau (August 1552). In the following year he conducted the negotiations for the marriage of Mary of England and Philip II. of Spain, to whom, in 1555, on the abdication of the emperor, he transferred his services, and by whom he was employed in the Netherlands. In April 1559 Granvella was one of the Spanish commissioners who arranged the peace of Cateau Cambrésis, and on Philip’s withdrawal from the Netherlands in August of the same year he was appointed prime minister to the regent, Margaret of Parma. The policy of repression which in this capacity he pursued during the next five years secured for him many tangible rewards, in 1560 he was elevated to the archiepiscopal see of Malines, and in 1561 he received the cardinal’s hat; but the growing hostility of a people whose religious convictions he had set himself to trample under foot ultimately made it impossible for him to continue in the Low Countries, and by the advice of his royal master he, in March 1564, retired to Franche Comté. Nominally this withdrawal was only of a temporary character, but it proved to be final. The following six years were spent in comparative quiet, broken, however, by a visit to Rome in 1565; but in 1570 Granvella, at the call of Philip, resumed public life by accepting another mission to Rome. Here he helped to arrange the alliance between the Papacy, Venice and Spain against the Turks, an alliance which was responsible for the victory of Lepanto. In the same year he became viceroy of Naples, a post of some difficulty and danger, which for five years he occupied with ability and success. He was summoned to Madrid in 1575 by Philip II. to be president of the council for Italian affairs. Among the more delicate negotiations of his later years were those of 1580, which had for their object the ultimate union of the crowns of Spain and Portugal, and those of 1584, which resulted in a check to France by the marriage of the Spanish infanta Catherine to Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy. In the same year he was made archbishop of Besançon, but meanwhile he had been stricken with a lingering disease; he was never enthroned, but died at Madrid on the 21st of September 1586. His body was removed to Besançon, where his father had been buried. Granvella was a man of great learning, which was equalled by his industry, and these qualities made him almost indispensable both to Charles V. and to Philip II.