SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE A. Ill 



Cambrian antiquity of the main surface-features of the earth's 

 crust, it is my opinion that our continental coast-lines are in 

 correlation with enormous faults, which have thrown down the 

 rocks on one side of a dislocation thousands of feet below their 

 corresponding masses on the other side, and, furthermore, that 

 the general direction of any given continental coast-line has 

 been determined by some system or section of jointing. 



In contending that jointing, slaty cleavage, great lines of 

 faulting, continental coast-lines, and mountain- chains are cor- 

 relative phenomena, I feel myself powerfully sustained, not only 

 by the parallelism between the United- States coast and the 

 Appalachian ridges, but equally by the corresponding parallelism 

 of the enormous faults (some with a downthrow of thousands 

 .of feet) which characterize this mountain- system. One of the 

 faults is known to stretch from Quebec to New Jersey ! 



The disturbances which developed the " great feature-lines " 

 of our globe seem to have been in operation in pre-Cambrian 

 periods. Evidences have been discovered in the Wahsatch range 

 (Rocky Mountains), by Clarence King, of an elevated mass, 

 defined in one tract by a nearly vertical cliff, which, with 

 an altitude of 30,000 feet, was presumably in existence before 

 the earliest palseozoic deposits were formed ; and there are the 

 strongest evidences for the conclusion that, before the adjacent 

 Cambrian rocks were deposited, the Archseans of North America 

 had been violently flexured, and thrown up into ridges belong- 

 ing to two divergent systems conformable with the zones of 

 weakness which determined the east-of-north and the west-of- 

 north outlines of this great continent ; the ridges forming in 

 its central region a mountain-mass in pre-Cambrian times. 



The agent which gave an east-of-north trend to the west coast 

 of Europe similarly affected much of the north-west coast of 

 Africa : seemingly it struck obliquely across the equatorial 

 section of the Atlantic, reappearing at Cape St. Roque, and 

 proceeding onward along the mountainous sea-board of Brazil to 

 the La Plata. Enormous as undoubtedly is this extent of 

 coast-line formation, it is surpassed by what is presented on the 

 west coast of the two Americas and the east coast of Asia : 

 obviously the former, with its parallel mountain-ranges, is in 

 genetic relation with the west-of-north and median sections of 

 meridional jointing, and the latter with the east-of-north section. 



Attention may next be directed to the great inland ranges 



