John Allen Howe

“ But bearing in mind the difficulties of interpretation, it is not at all unreasonable to assume that there may yet be regions where the gneissose rocks are the oldest; for where no schistose series is present there may be no criterion for estimating the age of the granites and gneisses. The exceedingly great difficulties which lie in the way of every attempt to unravel the history of an Archean rock-complex cannot be too forcibly emphasized ”

“ The Archean rocks have frequently been spoken of as the original crust of the earth; but even granting a cooling molten globe with a first-formed stony surface, it is tolerably clear that such a crust has nowhere yet been found, nor is it ever likely to be discovered. The very earliest recognizable sediments are the result of the destruction of still earlier exposures of rock; the oldest known volcanic rocks were poured upon a surface we can no longer distinguish, and as for the great granitoid masses, they could only have been formed under the pressure of superincumbent masses of material. ”

“ The so-called “Azoic” rocks have already been made to yield evidence of life, and there is no reason to presuppose the impossibility of finding other records of still earlier organisms.
The prevailing rocks of the Archean system are igneous, with metamorphosed varieties of the same; sedimentary rocks, distinctly recognizable as such, are scarce, though highly metamorphosed rocks supposed to be sediments, in some regions, take an important place. ”