geology yeology or MOUNT Nesert or Mount Desert Island, lying on the border of the sea's invasion of an ancient coastal plain, owes its existence to a vast bloot of granite driven upward, molten in romoto Devonian time and in- traded into the Older roak - with volcanio outpounding presently upon the vanished surface. that surface, could it be-seen restored as in a vision, would 110, mirage-like, with Sts strange, early plants and animals, high above the present mountain topa; for granite is a plutonie' rook, formed only at depths beneath the surface where long centuries of oooling and absence of free contact with the all give play to the crystallizing forces Inherent in its molten massa For time immeasurable since that for-off period, the land above the present surface of the Island must have remained above the sea, exposed to the attack of atmosphere for the denudation has been profound. As 1t progressed, the deeply buried granite grew, inch by inch and century by century, nearer to the lowering surface, then finally emerged, its heights only at first level with the land. It was at this stage, doubtless, that the present division into separate peaks was first determined by streams searching out the low points in the emerging ridge, which blocked, as it emerged, their seaward course. Finally, in the Glacial epoch, the whole region was deeply buried under a sheet of slowly moving ice that topped the highest peaks and was given, as it sought the sea, tremendous erosive power by its weight and the grinding burden of gravel, sand, and boulder rook it boro along. The less resistant roak around the granite - Metamorphosed clays and Bands of a yet earlier period - was eroded rapidly, leaving the mountains as we see them now and creating the rook-excarated basins of the lakes and fierd which lie among them, adding incalculably to their beauty. The deposits from that long wastage which has reduced the Devonian surface to our own and measures the time that has elapsed since life, emerging from the sea, first entered on its great ad- C-3m venture into the regions of the air above are lodged In the ocem, there to rest until some fresh convulsion or slow upward movement in earth's crust shall raise them to be again eroded. And with them in buried, beyond recall by man, the story of the intervening past; but one can roughly fill some portion of its larger details in from what the deeply studied geologic record has disclosed alsewhere. Throughout the whole of Paleosoia - Old Life - time, at whose midst the Devonian period lies, the dominant land-nass in eastern North America was Appalachia', & mountainous and voloanic land, anoient already at the dawning of the geologic record, which stretched along the eastern border of the present continent from Newfoundland south to Georgia, Eastward, it extended for an unknown distance into the Atlantic Ocean, beneath whose waters great portions of st Bank at the close of the Paleozoio period. To the westward it was bounded by a deep valley, or syncline - a downward dip in the earth's crust corresponding in general to a bordering rise or antioline continuing its upward slope. Into this valley, submorged by the ocean to a varying extent and opening deeply to the Atlantic at the north along a Line now marked by Gaspe peninsula and Anticosti Island, built from its deposits, the weetward flowing rivers of Appalachia poured their detritus, laying down successive strata that finally in the region of the southern Appalaohians reached the enothous thickness of forty thousand feet, seven and one-half miles, the bottom of the syncline sinking - and the anticline, or old-land, rising - as deposition was continued. At last, toward the end of the Paleosoie period, forces of tension - strains and stresses - in the earth's deeper crust, acting from the east, orumpled these deposits up, raising them in wave-like folds cresting toward the west, to form the Appalachian mountains; and Appalachia, the ancient continent, sank, leaving a western vergo of hard, primoval rook to constitute the Piedmont district at the mountains! foot, where - limiting navigation and creating water power by the falls it makes - its line is marked by -5- ofties. Bastern Maino and the soadian provinces - New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton - were portions of this Tanished continent and share in its history and the important part it played in early life development. Baok of the Devonian period, to whose crustal movements and deep-seated voloanism in the northorn portion of Appalachia Mount Desert Island and the mountains of the National Park owe their origin, life appears in the rook record only in marine and other water-dwelling forms. For water is the ancestral home of life, both plant and animal - its warse and shelter and sole habitat through all the long, early stages of its development. The earliest, and longest probably, of these are lost to record, but when life first appears in fossil evidence, in the Oambrian or pro-Cambrian period, it shows already a wonderful complexity of form, a varied adaptation to environment, that presupposes an immense, incalculable period beyond our furthest vision during which the primoridal life-units, floating in a sum- warmed sea - sexless but rapidly increasing and dividing: deathless in a favorable environment; neither animal nor vegetable, but with the potentiality of all development - took on organic form, dis- covered and utilized the gain of see, differentiated into animal and vegetable, and evolved, in the former, sense organs of a high per fection, limbs for motion, weapona for attack, defensive armor. The Silurian period, following the Cambrian and leading on to the Devonian, shows life still mainly dwelling in the sea, though nature, doubtless, in countless unrecorded forms was exp= perimenting ceaselessly on tide-swept coastal flats and river shores in adaptation of water-dwelling organisms, bound ancestrally to am internal circulatory system based upon the ocean, to the difficult conditions of the air. When, in the imperfect fossil record, the Devonian period is reached, after an interval of obscurity, the problem has been solved, the step taken, and life in the air achieved. Forest -7- growths for the first time appear; giant Club Mosses - Lepidodendrons - tree Forms, rising in species to a height of fifty feet; Oordaites, print Hire nut-bearing trees allied to the Conifers and Oyeads of & later time: and whome type porsists today in the green-stewmed, leafless Horsetails, 'Mingled with these there doubtless was an extensive, unrecorded growth of low, soft-Hasmed plants, spreading from the water's edge and making pasture presently for the rising ooeanio life from which the land vertebrates, and ultimately man himself if we read aright the story of the past, will come. Insects, too, springing from the crawling trilobites - the highest form of life existing in their early day - now first appear and rapidly develop, giving rise in the succeeding period to the earliest - but wonderfully perfect - flying forms, recorded in the New Brunswick rooks, whose type is with us still, scarce altered through the ages. Finallyo closing the Paleosoia ayole, there Game the great ooal formation period, the Garboniferous, a Hmo of low, eroded shores, encroaching seas and sluggish river drainage, giving rise to great oboked swamps, rank growth, and wide-spread peat deposits, now mineralized and turned to coal in such part as remains. This period lasted long, in an equilibilities broken, in eastern North America, by minor oscillations only, with advancing or retreating seas, but forces of disturbance were slowly gathering within the crest and the period ends in the slow upheaval of the Appalachian mountains and sinking of the Paleosoie land - in part to disappear beneath the seas in part to form the eastern border, from the St. Lawrence south, of the splifting continent of North America. Vanished as that old world is, merged in the present, our 11fe and landscape of today is founded on it, even in details, The beauty of the coast of Maine from Portland east, austere and stern, is due to the deep smothered fires of ages since that created its plutonic rocks, and hardened and compressed the sea-laid alaya and sands which they were driven into Its wonderful extent, a dozen miles or more to one of crow-light course, and many-harbored character are due to the unequal hardness of these rooks and anoient stream erosion. the massive basaltic roaka on the Bay of Fundy's Nova Bookian shore, terminating at the north in Capes Blomidon and Split and the magnificent oliffo of Cape d'or, which belong to the Devonian period, are evidence of its volcanio actigity The deep sandstones of Campa peninsula 6 jutting into the St. Lawrence Gulf, and the stream dissected heights of the Cataki11 Mountains whence New York City now derives its water, are splifted river-deltan, turned to rock, that tell of rain-gathering mountains and swift, silt-bearing streams in northern Appalachia, while the vast beds of limestome that strotch from Niagara to the Mammoth Cave and beautime Blue Grass region of Kentuaky, extending widely through the Central States, were formed by ooral and other lime-secreting organisms dwelling in the warm, clear waters of -10m a shallow, 'epi-continental sea, opening northward to the Arotio Ocean. Mild temperatures far to the north, aliko in sea and air, seem to have prevailed in earlier geologic time. Oorals grew within the Aratic circle in the Devonian period; the goal deposits of Cape Breton and Nova Sootia toll of a gonial, possibly a semi-tropical, elimate in the Carboniferous periods and in the subsequent Crotacoous period, when the Flowering Plants - the Angiosperma - first come to view and go forth to their conquest'of the world, making it habitable by fruit and root, by grass and grain and broad-leaved forest tree for the higher types of life which presently will come, eastern North America: to the arotio regions - then equable and warm - sooms by the fossil evidence to be their most probable home of origin and land of early, high development. with every phase of that development, and the wonderful development in animal life that followed, Mount Desert - not as an Old Island than, most probably, but mountain height dominating the broad, riversintersooted valley of the Gulf of Maine - must have been familiar. At last the genial life-period ended, and alow mocossive NETOS of arotic cold set in, burying the land beneath great sheets of ice. It sank, weighter with the tremendous burden, and surf-out benobes on rooks and mountain sides show levels where it rosted, exposed to the beating of M arotic sea. the coast retifeeted inland, and Mount Deaert Island, its lowlands submorged, the ocean sweeping through its deeper mountain gorgos, became a lanely group of delets, far from shore. Now, risen again, it constitutes the largest rock-built island on our Atlantic coast and by far its greatest elevation. Two types of rook, ignoous and sedimentary, unite to form it. These were studied by Professor Shaler of Harvard, a generation since, for the United States Geological Survey, his study being published in Sts Eighth Animal Report. He describes the Island's OF sedimentary rocks, which are its oldest and once covered its whole site, as having been originally a miform mass of phales - clays bardened into rock - intermixed with occasional sandy layers. Under the metamorphic influences of heat and pressure to which those rooks have been subjected, the shales have been altered to contorted schists - follated rocks, compressed and bent - while the more silicious or sandy beds have taken on the charaoter of voin-like quarts. Rooks of this type are tipically seen in what Professor Shaler terms the Bartlett Island series along the western shore, and again, - but thicker-bedded and originally, perhaps, more 11100 flags than shales - on the east coast from Sobooner Head to Rodiak! 8 Cove, in the vicinity of Bar Harboro Professor Shaler describes a separate Bar Harbor series, of thick-bodded, flaggy slates and associated bedded quartzites mixed with felsites do those latter being rook of ignoous origing and interrupting these, minerous later ignoous injections. A fourth 518- serios, similar to this last and probably a continuation of it, he describes to the eastward of the overs, and in places to their westward - where its more readily eroding rocks have given rise to Salisbury and Emory Coves. The Ovens' oliffs, and Emery Point where the Biological Laboratory is stationed, are formed of felsitio lavas, the whole of this considerable portion of the shore being composed largely of intrusive rooks which probably were of the nature of a wide surface flow, but are possibly the remain of a massive injection of lacoolithic, or domed, character. The dominant granitic mass which forms the range of the Mount Desert mountains Professor Shaler describes as essentially a dixe, though differing from ordinary dikes by its great extent and relative shortness. AB a true dike, it outs through the surrounding rocks, though it also elevates them, the only differences between it and lesser intrusions being that it was a conoomitant in the construction of an antiolinal ridge. -14- One of the largest normal granitic dikes in the Mount Desert region is that which forms the whole of Baker's Island, and, passing under the Bea, intersects the southern shore of Mount Desert between the Sea Wall and the Nubble. At Baker's Island, this dike is at least 3,000 feet in width, its seaward boundary not being seen, and on the main island St has similar width. Like the great mountain dike, where it comes in contact with the surrounding rooks, it penetrates their strata. older than these granites, belonging probably to Bilurian time but younger than the ancient sediments, is an extensive series of voloanie rooks - perphyrica and bressias mingled with volcanio ashon - formed probably by successive lava flows and volcanic ash- showers - which are to be seen of the Cranberry Islands, ocoupying the whole width of Little Cranberry from its north shore to the south end of the tide-swept isthmas which oonnects it with Baker's Island. -15- The bods of breccia - rock built of consolidated fragments - and voloanic ashes, the two materials being commingled beyond distinction, are very extensive, and - exhibiting no evidence of flow structure - fell probably through the air and were derived from volcanio ejections - though these ejections may have taken place during a period of sub- mergence and deposition has been made under pater. The evidence of these beds and others, from Cobscot Bay at the extramity of Maine to tho vioinity of Boston, clearly points, in Professor Shaler's view, totha existence along and off the New England coast - and in good part beneath the sea - of a,region charactorized by extensive deposits of voloanio matter, produced by outbreaks which took place at an early stage in the Paleonoio period - probably below the middle of the Silurian time. One must picture that region, which is now so quiet, as flaming with voloanoes then, and lined probably ndth voloanio peaks. -17- fiord - the only one upon our national coast, outside Alaska - is due to recent glaciation. Given time, granite wears charactoristically into a rounded form, and lakes exist almost alone in nowly glaciated country. The two greatest soulpturing Forges in the world, ice and ocean, have been at work together on Mount Desert Island, and it is to them, as well as to the noble character of the rook itself, the wonder- ful ocean views and dark, contrasting forest, that we owe the beauty, the variety, and inspiring character that have made the Island landscape war thy, in commanding portions, of the national accoptanoo and control. Two things stand out in looking back upon Mount Desert Island's goological history. The immense stability ft seems to show, in the relation between sea and land; what were coastal waters, receiving sediments, in the Cambrian period, are coastal waters now, interrupted only by the igneous uplift of the Island, which is wasting into them, helping to build up fresh sediments to be uplifted and eroded in some -16m The aedimantary rooks of Mount Desert - sea-laid deposits from a rain-swept land, involve, according to Professor Shaler, not less than 6,000 feet of original deposit, and probably more, but erosion alternated apparently with deposition as the coast rose and Bank, and the series, intersected later by the igneous intrusions, As nowhere continuous. the record is a fragment only, but this is clear that an inmense period of tim must have elepsed, prior probably to the earliest of the volomie outburst or igneous intrusions, during which deposition was continued and that, closely associated as the two now are, there is a great difference between the basal layer's of these ancient shales and the mountain granite as between the granito in its great upheaval and our time, and greater possibly; and that they take us baok to & far different world, immonsoly old and barren probably of any kind of life above the water level. The bold present character of the Mount Desert mountains, with their cliffs and precipices, their deep lake-basins and single 3 My instino in com (Int adob BROWN found YOU parties (C) a will BA but G BD's Bear Brook Quarry I opened Bear Brook Quarry some forty years ago to supply stone for the building of the Pulitzer tower, the wall and parapet of the terrace which the house opens onto above the shore and other work in rock which the architect's plans called for after Mrs. George Pendleton Bowler's estate of Chatwold had been purchased by Mr. Pulitzer, proprietor of the New York World. The quarry was near, the stone lay in deep, out- standing beds, easy to work, and much stone was needed as the tower had to be built up from a depth below sea- level to obtain a firm foundation, its base being made into a swimming pool which filled itself naturally at high tide and could be drained when the tide was low. The whole work then carried out cost Mr. Pulitzer a hundred and forty-thousand dollars and led to a law suit, but it was profitable for the quarry and give it reputation for the good quality of its stone which ex- tended its use for other building. 2. Two houses built of it at that time, using the brown, oxidized, seamed surface of the quarry beds, the Edgar Scott house on Cromwell Harbor and the John Innes Kane house between it and the village, still remain as two of the most beautiful and most solid houses ever built upon Mount Desert Island. Fred L. Savage, an excellent local architect, A was in charge of the work on these houses, the plans, prepared by leading architects in Boston and New York, heak Danie Sorage brook calling for this stone, whose quality they knew, and Mr. Savage did the work so well that I place the quarry Bear thereafter in his hands to operate, which he continued Junny to do till he died. Afterward the building of new summer residences at Bar Harbor coming to a stop, I closed the quarry and being occupied with other matters have never yet reopened it. But when later I gave my land upon the mountain to the Trustees of Public Reser- vations and they, later, to the Federal Government for the Park, I expressly reserved for the quarry sufficient rock for its future operation through many years. 3. Granite now is coming back into use, power drills have replaced the old hand drills, derricks are operated mechanically and motor trucks have replaced horses, creating great economies in the use of stone. There is no more enduring building rock than fine grained granite nor better monumental stone, as the old Egyptian monu- ments show, with the inscriptions upon them as clear as when first executed, after three to four thousand years. Bear Brook Quarry has lost no value through the years since it was operated. If the Government shall take it over for the purpose of its road, I do not want it taken as a thing without worth. I have taken interest and pride in the good product it turned out and the finely worked monuments to which the stone's good quality lent itself. But it so happened that there is no substiture for it as a road site if the Park's continuous mountain-to-shore motor road is built, for it occupies the corner where the road must turn and where the first sight of the ocean bursts upon one after descending from the mountain height. From the quarry summit the road shown in the survey made by the Federal Bureau of Roads, in preliminary study, runs straight to its objective -- the eastern end of the old Ocean Drive, near three miles away.