( 8 ) 
are merely tilted, bent or crumpled; but in the coast ranges of 
California the strata for many thousands of square miles were 
shattered at this upheaval until the average size of the fragments 
does not exceed the size of a hen’s egg. The heat produced by 
this crushing was sufficient to modify the rocks profoundly and 
to convert them from ordinary soft sandstones and shales into ser¬ 
pentine and hard granular rocks much resembling those of New¬ 
port. The section on the fortieth parallel after this upheaval is 
represented by Fig. 4. 
Soon after this uplift the coast ranges of California and the 
cascade range, partially subsided and formed more groups of 
islands. They remained in this condition, with slight changes, 
throughout the remainder of the Cretaceous period and for long 
after. At the close of the Cretaceous, however, an immensely 
important upheaval took place in the heart of the continent, and 
the entire Rocky Mountain system was brought above water. 
The area now known as the Pacific slope then began for the first 
time to drain into the Pacific Ocean. Fig. 5 shows the section at 
the close of the Cretaceous, and the renewed movement on the 
old Wahsatch fault. 
The periods next succeeding the Cretaceous are the Eocene and 
Miocene, both very quiet on the Pacific coast. Indeed the 
Eocene was absolutely continuous with the Cretaceous so that 
there is no sharp distinction between them. This is a state of 
things which is known to exist nowhere else in the world except 
in New Zealand. At the close of the Miocene the Pacific coast 
rose once more, and land stretched continuously from the Pacific 
coast to the Rocky Mountains substantially as it does to-day. 
A mere glance at the diagram shows that there has been a con¬ 
tinuous tendency to the extension of the land area of the region 
called the Pacific slope from the beginning of the Palaeozoic 
onward. This is a fact not without parallel elsewhere, but 
nevertheless of the deepest interest. The whole tendency of ex¬ 
ternal agents is to annihilate land. The waves cut away the 
shore, the winds blow dust to sea, the frost turns solid rock to 
sand which the streams carry out to the ocean in vast quantities. 
It is true that these causes act slowly, but geology reckons by 
millions of years, and it is evident that were the volume of the 
