DIASTROPHISM AND THE FORMATIVE PROCESSES 273 



more than 600 feet plus the rise of the sea-level due to filling, but, 

 because they lie inclined upon one another, the sum of their individual 

 thicknesses may have reached the impressive figures indicated. 

 So also, under these conditions, the vertical depth of the foreset beds 

 would never equal the depth of the ocean, but the sum of their 

 individual thicknesses might many times exceed its greatest depth. 



Under the conditions named, the shelf-sea or topset deposits 

 should bear abundant evidence of a shallow water origin at all hori- 

 zons, since none were formed at a greater depth than 600 feet, plus 

 the rise of the sea-level, and yet their stratigraphic thickness meas- 

 ured in the usual way, the correct way, might rise to some thousands 

 of feet without the slightest subsidence. 



Under the same conditions, the upper edges of the foreset beds, 

 or beds of the abysmal slope, might show evidences of sea agitation 

 and the special marks of currents actuated by winds and tides, and 

 they might be filled with fossils that lived within a thousand feet 

 or so of the sea surface. These evidences of somewhat shallow 

 water might affect the upper edges of tens of thousands or hundreds 

 of thousands of feet of inclined beds measured in the usual correct 

 way. Farther down on the abysmal slope the beds would of course 

 carry life implying deeper water, and at still greater depths there 

 would be a gradation toward, and finally into, true abysmal 

 deposits. 



It is immaterial whether the sediments' are inorganic or organic 

 so long as the comminution is such as to permit transportation in 

 one or another of the three usual ways. Coral sand and silt are as 

 susceptible to sloping sedimentation as siliceous or silicate sands 

 and silts, and perhaps as frequently take on sloping attitudes. 

 The depositional dips of corraline limestones are often of a pro- 

 nounced order. Calcareous sands and silts from any organic 

 source, foraminal, algous, and bacterial included, are susceptible of 

 deposition on either topset or foreset slopes, and so beds of lime- 

 stone or dolomite may alternate with other topset beds or foreset 

 beds in normal sloping terranes. 



The principles of stratification, and of stratigraphic interpreta- 

 tion, thus systematically embodied in the outward growth of the 

 continental shelves, are likewise embodied in the growth of shelves 



