LAND AND WATER 17 



also across the Vosges from Lorraine to the central plateau 

 and Brittany. These mountain chains sent branches into 

 Spain as far as Seville and the Meseta in one direction ; and, 

 striking across Bohemia, reached as far as the Urals below the 

 Carpathians and the Balkans, radiating into Asia from the 

 Altai Mountains to the Gulf of Petchili, Tonkin, Annam, and 

 Cambodia, and reappearing again in Australia, in Brazil, and 

 the neighbourhood of Canada. Finally, we have a fourth, more 

 southerly series of folds of still later origin, corresponding to 

 the Balkans, the Alps, the Jura, the Carpathians, the Pyrenees, 

 the Apennines, the Atlas mountains, the Caucasus, the 

 Himalaya, the warped massif of southern and eastern China, 

 and the mountains which skirt Indo-China on both sides, 

 and, stretching out in a median chain in the Malay peninsula, 

 betray their presence by the numerous volcanic islands of the 

 Pacific. These folds then extend to the western coast of 

 America, and, following the ocean, to North America and 

 Alaska, winch they reach as far as Terra del Fuego in a southerly 

 direction. 



The Alpine-Himalayan chains are the highest in the world, 

 and attain in the Himalaya a height of 8,840 metres ; eternal 

 snows accumulate on their summits, while vast glaciers move 

 slowly down the entire length of their high valleys. In their 

 vicinity, too, there are volcanoes, distributed so thickly 

 along the coasts of the Pacific as to surround this ocean with 

 what has been called its girdle of fire ; and it is either at the foot 

 or the side of these mountains that earthquakes most frequently 

 occur. All this is evidence of recent origin. The older mountains 

 have been worn down, corroded and levelled by atmospheric 

 agencies. It requires all the ingenuity of the geologist to 

 reconstruct them by a study of the strata folded when they 

 formed, and which to-day are like the buried foundations of a 

 ruined city. A geographer limiting himself to a study of the 

 earth's surface would hardly suspect their existence. They, 

 too, once possessed glaciers, traces of which are found even on 

 the oldest gneiss, but the actual remains of the original 

 Hercynian ridges have been reduced by the wear and tear of 

 time to hills of too modest a height for snow to remain long in 

 temperate regions. The volcanoes indicate that quite recent 

 fractures still persist along the flanks of recently formed folds, 

 leaving a free passage for the molten matter within the earth. 



