In these regions the rocks have yielded to immense pressure. They have
been folded, crumpled, and mashed, and even their minute grains, as
one may see with a microscope, have often been puckered, broken, and
crushed to powder. It is to these mechanical movements and strains
which the rocks have suffered in every part that we may attribute
their metamorphism, and the degree to which they have been changed is
in direct proportion to the degree to which they have been deformed
and mashed.
Other factors, however, have played important parts. Rock crushing
develops heat, and allows a freer circulation of heated waters and
vapors. Thus chemical reactions are greatly quickened; minerals are
dissolved and redeposited in new positions, or their chemical
constituents may recombine in new minerals, entirely changing the
nature of the rock, as when, for example, feldspar recrystallizes as
quartz and mica.
Early stages of metamorphism are seen in _slate_. Pressure has
hardened the marine muds, the arkose (p. 186), or the volcanic ash
from which slates are derived, and has caused them to cleave by the
rearrangement of their particles.
Under somewhat greater pressure, slate becomes _phyllite_, a clay
slate whose cleavage surfaces are lustrous with flat-lying mica
flakes. The same pressure which has caused the rock to cleave has set
free some of its mineral constituents along the cleavage planes to
crystallize there as mica.
[Illustration: Fig. 255. A Foliated Rock]
=Foliation.= Under still stronger pressure the whole structure of the
rock is altered. The minerals of which it is composed, and the new
minerals which develop by heat and pressure, arrange themselves along
planes of cleavage or of shear in rudely parallel leaves, or _folia_.
Of this structure, called _foliation_, we may distinguish two
types,--a coarser feldspathic type, and a fine type in which other
minerals than feldspar predominate.
_Gneiss_ is the general name under which are comprised coarsely
foliated rocks banded with irregular layers of feldspar and other
minerals. The gneisses appear to be due in many cases to the crushing
and shearing of deep-seated igneous rocks, such as granite and gabbro.
_The crystalline schists_, representing the finer types of foliation,
consist of thin, parallel, crystalline leaves, which are often
remarkably crumpled. These folia can be distinguished from the laminae
of sedimentary rocks by their lenticular form and lack of continuity,
and especially by the fact that they consist of platy, crystalline
grains, and not of particles rounded by wear.
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