258 Elie tie Beaumont's Researches on some of 



which there is a want of continuity, and a sudden variation 

 of character, constituting a new interruption in the series of 

 sedimentary deposits. 



The waters which have transported the materials of the 

 first of these formations would appear to have been received 

 into lakes of fresh water which covered, in one direction, the 

 N.W. portion of the department of the Isere, La Bresse, and 

 perhaps, Alsace, and even the environs of the lake of Con- 

 stance; and in the other, the portion of the department of the 

 Basses Alpes between Digne, Manosque, and Barjols : whilst 

 the materials of the second formation appear to have been 

 violently carried by temporary currents which have discharged 

 themselves into the Mediterranean. These latter currents 

 are generally known as diluvial currents, though they offer 

 nothing in common with the Deluge of history, and though 

 their passage took place before the human race appeared on 

 our continent, where they destroyed animals of species now 

 extinct. Discussions will still perhaps be carried on respect- 

 ing their origin, which may have merely been the result of 

 the melting of the snows, instantaneously effected when the 

 principal chain of the Alps was elevated ; but it seems generally 

 admitted that their passage immediately followed the last dis- 

 location of the Alpine strata. 



If we cast a general glance on the Alps and neighbouring 

 countries, we may observe that the crests of the St. Baume, 

 the Lebaron, the Ventoux, and the Montagne de Poet, in the 

 South of France, the principal chain of the Alps from the 

 Valais to Austria, and the less elevated crest, comprising the 

 Pilate, &c. in Switzerland, are so many different chains, which, 

 notwithstanding their inequality, are comparable with each 

 other both as respects their parallelism and their common 

 analogies to the system of the Western Alps. This parallelism 

 and these analogies would alone afford us powerful reasons 

 for believing that the whole of these mountain-chains were 

 formed at the same time, and are only different parts of a single 

 system of fractures produced at the same moment. We can 

 at furthest conceive the idea of dividing them into two groups, 

 — that of Provence, and that of the Alps ; but we are prevented 

 from doing this by the analogous relations observable among 

 the different fractures, and by a general movement which we 

 may consider the surface of a part of France to have suffered 

 when it contracted a double slope ; ascending in one direction 

 from Dijon and Bourges towards Le Forez and Auvergne, 

 and on the other from the shores of the Mediterranean towards 

 the same countries. These opposed slopes present at their 

 junction a kind of crest, situated precisely in the line of eleva- 

 tion 



