XIV. 



THE GEOLOGY OF THE ALPS. 



This review appeared in the American Journal of Science for January, 1872, and 

 serves to throw much light upon many important and still debated points of geology. 

 I have added as an appendix to the present reprint the recent conclusions of Favre, 

 and the statements of Fillet, which serve to confirm certain positions assumed in the 

 review, and elsewhere in this volume.* 



SINCE the days of De Saussure, the Alps have been the ob- 

 ject of constant study. No other portion of Europe offers so 

 many problems of interest to the geologist and the physical 

 geographer as this great mountain-chain, whether we consider 

 its lakes, glaciers, and moraines, its curiously disturbed and 

 inverted fossiliferous strata, which seem, at first sight, arranged 

 for the confusion alike of paleontologists and stratigraphists, or 

 the crystalline rocks which form its highest summits. To give 

 a list of the various investigators who have contributed their 

 share to the elucidation of this region would, of itself, be no 

 slight task, and would besides be foreign to our present pur- 

 pose ; which is to call attention to the learned work of Pro- 

 fessor Alphonse Favre of Geneva, in which he has given us the 

 results of more than twenty-five years of labor in the study of 

 Alpine geology, chiefly in Savoy and the adjacent parts of 

 Piedmont and Switzerland, embracing Mont Blanc and its 

 vicinity. It is now twelve years since the present writer had 

 occasion to review, in the American Journal of Science ((2), 

 XXIX. 118), some points in Alpine geology raised by our 

 author in his memoir " Sur les terrains liassique et keuperien de 



* Recherches Geologiques dans les parties de la Savoie, du Piemont, et de 

 la Suisse voisines du Mont Blanc, avec un Atlas de 32 planches, par Alphonse 

 Favre, Professeur de Geologie a 1' Academic de Geneve. 3 Vols. 8vo. Paris. 

 1867. 



