GREAT BASIN OVERTHRUSTS 
255 
Then, without any particular reason for so doing, the King con¬ 
clusion came to be supplanted by that of block-faulting, wherein 
the Basin Range blocks were regarded as floating highly because 
their tops had been unloaded through erosion. Basin Range 
structure became an established type of mountain architecture. 
At length there appeared upon the scene certain inquisitive ones 
who wished to see with their own eyes so magic an hypothesis 
demonstrated in the field. Repeated search failing utterly to dis¬ 
close a single desert range in which the premised fault was in evi¬ 
dence at the mountain base, it began to dawn upon the minds of 
some of those investigators most directly interested in the subject 
that the whole hypothesis might be after all not based upon an 
observed feature and an established fact, but only a brilliant con¬ 
ception of the same poetic fancy as Goethe’s theory of the origin 
of the vertebrate skull from coalesced and distorted vertebrae. 
In bringing forth to light of day that most brilliant geological 
conception of the century just passed, the fault-block idea of 
Basin Range structure and its necessary corollary of isostasy, it is 
a singular circumstance that there were not adduced at the time 
abundant and critically supporting proofs. So simple, so self 
contained, and so beautiful was the theme that it was, perhaps, 
not thought necessary to set forth especially observed examples. 
Youthful and inquiring spirits of a succeeding generation in¬ 
nocently expected to find at first glance the great fault-lines clearly 
limned at the base of each desert block as it loomed up before 
them. That they did not added a certain piquancy to the quest and 
served to intensify an innate desire actually to behold such unique 
phenomenon. But fifty years of diligent search disclosed not a 
single fault plane at the foot of alleged fault-scarp in these block 
mountains. Finally one of the most seasoned geologists of his day 
and of this field was led to exclaim, with not a little petulancy, 
that nobody had ever beheld such a feature. Implied conclusion 
was that such structure had no existence. 
Despite the circumstance that normal fault-lines which had 
never been seen at the base of a single tilted mountain block of the 
desert in half a century during which the concept prevailed, the 
final unearthing of such a feature excited as much interest today 
as it would have done at any time during previous years. 
Repeated failure from 1900 on to locate either fault-lines as an 
