DIASTROPHISM AND THE FORMATIVE PROCESSES 335 



there were at least two distinct periods of deformation, separated 

 by a period of comparative quiescence. The iirst stage of dis- 

 turbance falls at the close of the WestphaHan epoch, and hence may 

 take the name of Westphalo-Carbonide movement. At this time 

 extensive warpings and folding affected large portions of central 

 and southern Europe and gave rise to a notable series of mountains 

 which are grouped under the names Armorican and Variscan 

 chains,"^ or collectively the Hercynian system,^ and sometimes 

 designated the Paleozoic Alps.^ 



The area of Armorican folds has a breadth reaching from Bristol, 

 England, on the north, to La Vendee on the south, a distance of 330 

 miles across the strike. "• This broad belt was crumpled into a 

 succession of parallel folds trending east and west. They extend 

 from the Atlantic shores of South Ireland, Cornwall, and Brittany 

 eastward through the Ardennes, Vosges, Schwartzwald, Taunus, 

 Harz, Thiiringerwald, Frankenwald, Erzgebirge, and on into the 

 Sudetes and Carpathians and are probably continuous, beneath 

 younger formations, with the Carboniferous chains among the 

 Balkans, and with the folds of the same age in Dobrudja, near 

 the Black Sea,^ a really great range of mountains of which we have 

 today only the stumps remaining. 



It is generally agreed that the chief episode in the formation 

 of this great mountain system occurred between the deposition of 

 the WestphaHan and that of the Stephanian series. On the north 

 side of the chain — in the south of England, in the Ardennes, in the 

 Harz, and in Westphalia — the folding follows the WestphaHan, but 

 as the Stephanian is absent from this belt the date of the folding 

 cannot be closely determined, though it is certainly before the 

 Saxonian which inaugurates the Permian transgression.^ But in 

 the central plateau, the principal orogenic movements antedate 

 the Stephanian which rests directly upon the Dinantian and older 



' Eduard Suess, The Face of the Earth, Sollas trans., II (1906), 86-111. 

 ^Marcel Bertrand, "La chaine des Alpes, et la formation du continent Euro- 

 peen," Bull. Soc. Geol. France, 3d Ser., XV (1887), 435-40. 



3 Emanuel Kayser, Geologische Formationskunde, 2d ed. (1902), p. 174. 



^ A. J. Jukes-Browne, op. cit., pp. 178-88. 



5 Emile Haug, op. cit., p. 830. ^ Ibid., p. 831. 



