FAREWELL ADDRESS 267 



Germany, the idea that mountain chains were buiU symmetrically; 

 one group of oldest rocks formed the lifted or lifting axis, and upon 

 each side were arranged younger rocks in parallel zones. Thus, you 

 will still find in my own writing on the substructure of Vienna, in the 

 year 1862, a presentation of the x^lps as symmetrical mountains. 



Of course, this idea did not prevail without objections. At 

 nearly every gathering of German naturalists at that time, the old 

 Bergrath Diicker arose to protest against it. No one listened to him. 

 With Schimper it was the same. The authority of Leopold von 

 Buch, who expressed himself for symmetrical construction, remained 

 unshaken. Then Leopold von Buch died. Upon this primary 

 question of modern geology you will find no explanation for the origin 

 of mountains in the leading text-books of that time, as, for instance, 

 Lyell's justly celebrated Principle'; of Geology. 



For the investigation of this problem no part of Europe was more 

 advantageously situated than Austria. There the land is arrayed 

 before us in unusual variety. Hardly anywhere in Europe are tec- 

 tonic contrasts so plainly presented — contrasts between the Bohemian 

 Mass and the Alps, between the portion of Russian table-land beneath 

 the Galician plain and the Carpathians, the peculiar connection of 

 Alps and Carpathians, the continuance of the Turkestan depression 

 over the Aral Sea into the depression of the Danube and to Vienna, 

 and much besides. In the year 1857 the idea was still often main- 

 tained that the deposits found in the eastern Alps did not occur at 

 all outside of the Alps, so great were the difficulties which the applica- 

 tion of the accepted stratigraphic divisions of England and south 

 Germany bore to the strange occurrences in the Alps themselves. 



Soon, however, it was recognized that in the Bohemian Mass the 

 stratigraphic sequence was far less complete than in the adjoining 

 regions of the Alps, and that in Bohemia particularly there is an extraor- 

 dinary interruption of marine deposits extending upward into the 

 Middle Cretaceous, whereas in the Alps all these great epochs are 

 represented by marine strata. This same transgression of the Middle 

 and Upper Cretaceous shows again in Galicia, then far into Russia, 

 on the other side of the French Central Plateau, on the Spanish 

 Meseta, in large parts of the Sahara, in the valley of the Mississippi, 

 and northward over this region to the vicinity of the Arctic Sea, in 



