When the earth's crust first formed it was still hot, though not so hot as when it was a mass of melted, glowing substance. As it moved through the cold spaces of the sky, it lost more heat and its crust became thicker. At length the cloud masses became condensed enough to fall in torrents of water, and a great sea covered all the land. This was before any living thing, plant or animal, existed on our planet. Can you imagine the continents and islands that form the land part of a map or globe suddenly overwhelmed by the oceans, the names and boundaries of which you have taken such pains to learn in the study of geography? The globe would be one blank of blue water, and geography would be abolished—and there would be nobody to study it. Possibly the fishes in the sea might not notice any change in the course of their lives, except when they swam among the ruins of buried cities and peered into the windows of high buildings, or wondered what new kind of seaweed it was when they came upon a submerged forest.

In that old time of the great sea that covered the globe, we are told that there was a dense atmosphere over the face of the deep. So things were shaping themselves for the far-off time when life should exist, not only in the sea, where the first life did appear, but on land. But it took millions of years to fit the earth for living things.

The cooling of the earth made it shrink, and the crust began to be folded into gentle curves, as the skin of a shrunken apple becomes wrinkled on the flesh. Some of these creases merely changed the depth of water on the sea bottom; but one ridge was lifted above the water. The water parted and streamed down its sloping sides, and a granite reef, which shone in the sunshine, became the first dry land. It lay east and west, and stretched for many miles. It is still dry land and is a part of our own continent. Now it is but a small part of the country, but it is known by geologists, who can tell its boundaries, though newer land joins it on every side. It is named the Laurentian Hills, on geological maps. Its southern border reaches along the northern boundary of the Great Lakes to the head-waters of the Mississippi River.

From this base, two ridges are lifted, forming a colossal V. One extends northeast to Nova Scotia; the other northwest to the Arctic seas. The V encloses Hudson Bay.

Besides this first elongated island of bare rocks, land appeared in a strip where now the Blue Ridge Mountains stretch from New England to Georgia. The other side of the continent lifted up two folds of the crust above sea level. They are the main ridges of the Colorado and the Wasatch Mountains. Possibly the main ridge of the Sierra Nevada rose also at this time. The Ozark group of mountains, too, showed as a few island peaks above the sea.

These first rocks were rapidly eaten away, for the atmosphere was not like ours, but heavily charged with destructive gases, which did more, we believe, to disintegrate the exposed rock surfaces than did the two other forces, wind and water, combined. The sediment washed down to the sea by rains, accumulated along the shores, filling the shallows and thus adding to the width of the land areas. The ancient granite ridge of the Laurentian Hills is now low, and slopes gently. This is true of all very old mountains. The newer ones are high and steep. It takes time to grind down the peaks and carry off the waste material loosened by erosion.

Far more material than could have been washed down the slopes of the first land ridges came directly from the interior of the earth, and spread out in vast, submarine layers upon the early crust. Volcanic craters opened under water, and poured out liquid mineral matter, that flowed over the sea bottom before it cooled. Imagine the commotion that agitated the water as these submerged chimneys blew off their lids, and discharged their fiery contents! It was long before the sea was cool enough to be the home of living things.

The layers of rock that formed under the sea during this period of the earth's history are of enormous thickness. They were four or five miles deep along the Laurentian Hills. They broadened the original granite ridge by filling the sea bottom along the shores. The backbones of the Appalachian system and the Cordilleras were built up in the same way—the oldest rocks were worn away, and their dÉbris built up newer ones in strata.

When these layers of rock became dry land, the earth's crust was much more stable and cool than it had ever been before. The vast rock-building of that era equals all that has been done since. The layers of rocks formed since then do not equal the total thickness of these first strata. So we believe that the time required to build those ArchÆan rock foundations equals or surpasses the vast period that has elapsed since the ArchÆan strata were formed.

The northern part of North America has grown around those old granite ridges by the gradual rising of the shores. The geologist may walk along the Laurentian Hills, that parted the waters into a northern and a southern ocean. He crosses the rocky beds deposited upon the granite; then the successive beds formed as the land rose and the ocean receded. Age after age is recorded in the rocks. Gradually the sea is crowded back, and the land masses, east, west, and north, meet to form the continent. Nowhere on the earth are the steps of continental growth shown in unbroken sequence as they are in North America.

How long ago did those first islands appear above the sea? Nobody ventures a definite answer to this question. No one has the means of knowing. But those who know most about it estimate that at the least one hundred million years have passed since then—one hundred thousand thousand years!