Nor Does It Cease Till The
Progress Of The Warmer Day Removes The Northern Ice-Dam, Sets Free
The Flood, And The Region Of Archaean Rocks Stands Bare And Dry.
It must have been a dreary spectacle at that time, low, bare hills
of gneiss, granite, etc.; low valleys half-filled with broken rock
and over everything a sprinkling of erratic boulders; no living thing
in sight, nothing green, nothing growing, nothing but evidence of
mighty power used only to destroy.
A waste of shattered granite
spotted with hundreds of lakes, thousands of lakelets, millions of
ponds that are marvellously blue, clear, and lifeless.
But a new force is born on the scene; it attacks not this hill or
rock, or that loose stone, but on every point of every stone and
rock in the vast domain, it appears - the lowest form of lichen,
a mere stain of gray. This spreads and by its own corrosive power
eats foothold on the granite; it fructifies in little black velvet
spots. Then one of lilac flecks the pink tones of the granite,
to help the effect. Soon another kind follows - a pale olive-green
lichen that fruits in bumps of rich brown velvet; then another
branching like a tiny tree - there is a ghostly kind like white
chalk rubbed lightly on, and yet another of small green blots, and
one like a sprinkling of scarlet snow; each, in turn, of a higher
and larger type, which in due time prepares the way for mosses
higher still.
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