110 =. LeConte—Structure and Origin of Mountains. 
direction which will accomplish the required result with the 
minimum expenditure. Now he says, to make a mountain range 
by horizontal pressure would require demonstrably, a maximum, 
and by vertical pressure a minimum, expenditure of force, in 
proportion to the height and mass lifted. Therefore ~ thinks 
fore anticlines and downward for synclines. The s me of San 
Francisco are many of them paved with wooden ‘che sa which 
swell by wetting and are pushed up into ridges, as everybody 
supposes, by horizontal pressure. But acc cording to Captain 
force in proportion to the visible work don 
But again Captain Dutton thinks that the crust of the earth, 
under horizontal pressure, would not and could not yield 
gradually and quietly so as to retain its continuity, but would 
pene into fragments—it would not mash, but smash and “go 
5, 1:10, or even 1:14; yet there is nosmashing or “ going to 
” but only quiet yielding, like dough or plastic clay. Again 
tt mountain ranges consisting wholly of crumpled strata with 
many folds closely appressed, without even a granite axis, 
like the Appalachian or the Coast Range of California, it is simply 
inconceivable that the crumpling force should have acted in 
any other direction than horizontally; yet the strata, though 
sometimes broken and sli , are in large measure ‘continu- 
ous; there is no shivering into ‘rubble, like “ pack ice driven 
gainst a shore.” As to the condition of the strata at the time 
ps these results were accomplished, i. e., whether or not they 
were more p than now, is another question, and one with 
which we are not now as structural geologists concerned. But 
this is precisely the eres which Capt. Dutton as physicist 
should have discussed. Here are strata in positions such that it 
is inconceivable they could have been assumed except by hori- 
