File:The Coastal setting, rocks and woods of the Sieur de Monts National Monument (1917) (20471205459).jpg

Title: The Coastal setting, rocks and woods of the Sieur de Monts National Monument
Identifier: coastalsettingro00unit (find matches)
Year: 1917 (1910s)
Authors: United States. National Park Service
Subjects:
Publisher: Washington : Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service : G. P. O.
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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SIEUR DE MONTS NATIONAL MONUMENT. 9 The boldly uplifted range of Mount Desert is one of the most stubborn survivors of that ancient highland, and the beauty of the island as seen from the sea, unparalleled along our whole Atlantic coast, is due to its persistent retention of some portion of the height which the whole region once had but which nearly every other part of it has lost. Although the noble granitic rocks that form this range rest quiet and cold in their age to-day, they were once hot and energetic, pressing their way upward, as a vast molten mass, toward—and overflowing possibly—the ancient surface of the land. The massive granite stretches east and west across the island, inclosed wherever the attack of ice or sea has failed to lay it bare by rocks of a wholly different origin and character. At first these other rocks are seen as isolated fragments in- cluded in the granite; the fragments then become more frequent until
Text Appearing After Image:
Pegmatite dike filling a rift in the granite of Pemetic Mountain. solid rock of their own type, strangely twisted and contorted, begins to take the granite's place, as in the wonderful displays at Great Head and Hunter's Beach Head; further on, the granite is only seen penetrating these other rocks in long, narrow crevices, as on Sutton Island; at last it ceases entirely, and the rocky floor, wherever it can be observed, is wholly formed by rocks like those first seen as fragments caught and frozen in the cooling granite. Near the margin of its area, again, the granite is finer textured than where erosion has laid bare its ancient depths, as in the mountain gorges; for it is the way of igneous, or fire- formed, rocks when crystallizing from a molten state to develop smaller crystals and finer texture near their boundaries, where the cooling is more rapid. This fine texture of the margin of the granite, the inclusion of angular and freshly broken fragments of the regional rocks within its borders,

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