308 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALAEONTOLOGY. 



end of the nineteenth century may well feel proud to have 

 witnessed, and carried with it into its boasted wealth of 

 scientific enlightenment. 



His earlier geological papers on special areas show Professor 

 Suess only as the ardent field-surveyor, the lover of mountains, 

 the laborious student compiling results from his own note- 

 books. But the little book entitled Die Entstehung der 

 Alpen^ or The Origin of the Alps, which was published in 

 1875, already betrayed the dawn of new thoughts, full of 

 freshness and interest. Professor Suess in that work contested 

 the upheaval of mountains and continents by forces acting 

 vertically upward ; he refuted the active participation of erup- 

 tive rocks in the origin of mountain-chains, and after a brilliant 

 description of the most important mountain-systems of the 

 earth, he demonstrated that any arrangement of those accord- 

 ing to geometrical laws was altogether illusory. The difficult 

 problems of crust-displacements were, he said, so intimately 

 associated with the question of the age and origin of 

 mountains that the latter could not possibly be solved by 

 any mathematical deduction or general rule obtained from 

 leading-lines of strike and distribution, but demanded an 

 accurate knowledge of tectonical structure in each case. 



A more detailed examination of the Alpine system 1 led 

 Suess to the conclusion that the structure of this mountain- 

 system was not symmetrical, as had previously been supposed, 

 but was, on the contrary, essentially one-sided. The steep 

 descent of the western Alps towards the plains of Piedmont 

 and Lombardy indicated a curved fault-line, and the Alpine 

 rocks had been folded together under the influence of a 

 tangential force acting in north-west, north, and north-east 

 directions from the leading crust-rupture. It had been cus- 

 tomary to regard the zones of rock-formations on the south 

 side of the eastern Alps as folded masses that had been 

 pushed aside during the upheaval of the central chain, but 

 Suess contested this, saying these zones represented an 

 independent chain which had been pressed against the 

 Alps by a horizontal force acting towards the north-west. 

 He pointed out that farther east still another chain, the 



1 This name was applied, by Suess in wider sense to include the Alps 

 proper, the folded Jura mountains, the Carpathians, the Hungarian moun- 

 tains, the Dinaric ranges along the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea, and 

 the Apennines. 



