Davis and Wood.] 
380 
[Nov. 20, 
same surface with the Highland peneplain ; and the best answer that 
can be made is in the affirmative. A long period of lower conti- 
nental stand is needed for both ; this period was closed by a mas- 
sive uplifting at a time far enough back in the past to allow the 
subsequent erosion of deep and steep-sided valleys in the hard rocks 
of the Highlands and to permit the excavation of broad lowlands 
on the softer sandstones and shales between the hard trap-sheets 
of the Triassic area, leaving the trap projecting as even-topped 
ridges. Moreover, when the restoration of the Schooley baselevel 
peneplain is extended southeastward by the process already de- 
scribed, the highest crests of the various trap-ridges being taken as 
indices of the former surface of the Triassic area, a tolerably con- 
sistent series of contours can be drawn, showing a broad eastward 
extension of the basele veiled area. We conclude therefore that the 
Schooley peneplain stretched southeastward, as well as westward ; 
it was a geographic feature of great importance in the earlier his- 
tory of our country. But although the broad plain of faint relief 
thus restored must have been a nearly level lowland before it was ele- 
vated, its remnants do not indicate that it was uniformly elevated 
into a level highland ; for while it falls slowly below sea-level about 
New Brunswick, where the Palisade-Rocky Hill crest-line dips un- 
derground for a distance of twenty miles, it rises gently to the north, 
northwest and southwest as a faintly warped and inclined surface. 
This unequal elevation is natural enough. Nothing can be more 
likely than that the elevation of the extinct plain should have been 
uneven and greater at one place than another. Irregular upheavals 
of every degree are clearly seen in the deformation of bedded rocks 
that once lay horizontal, and it is natural enough that similar ir- 
regularity of upheaval should appear in the elevation of our old, 
once nearly horizontal peneplain. 
15. Extension of the Schooley peneplain over the Triassic area. 
Let the observer now visit some of the more commanding points of 
view on the crests of the long Watchung trap-ridges and attempt 
to reconstruct the extinct geography, of which the remnants are 
so suggestive. 
Westward there is the broad valley of the Passaic, worn out on 
the sandstones that overlie the trap-sheets ; this must in imagina- 
tion be filled up to the surface that is defined by the summit of the 
Watchung ridges on the southeast, and by the front of the High- 
land plateau on the northwest. Washington valley is hollowed 
