Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/250

 It may be concluded with fair probability that the folds began to rise in the southeast, where they are crowded closest together, some of them having begun here while coal marshes were still forming farther west; and that the last folds to be begun were the fainter ones on the plateau, now seen in Negro mountain and Chestnut and Laurel ridges. In consequence of the inequalities in the force of compression or in the resistance of the yielding mass, the folds do not continue indefinitely with horizontal axes, but vary in height, rising or falling away in great variety. Several adjacent folds often follow some general control in this respect, their axes rising and falling together. It is to an unequal yielding of this kind that we owe the location of the Anthracite synclinal basins in eastern Pennsylvania, the Coal Measures being now worn away from the prolongation of the synclines, which rise in either direction.

8. Perm-Triassic denudation.—During and for a long time after this period of mountain growth, the destructive processes of erosion wasted the land and lowered its surface. An enormous amount of material was thus swept away and laid down in some unknown ocean bed. We shall speak of this as the Perm-Triassic period of erosion. A measure of its vast accomplishment is seen when we find that the Newark formation, which is generally correlated with Triassic or Jurassic time, lies unconformably on the eroded surface of Cambrian and Archean rocks in the southeastern part of the State, where we have concluded that the Paleozoic series once existed; where the strata must have risen in a great mountain mass as a result of the Appalachian deformations; and whence they must therefore have been denuded before the deposition of the Newark beds. Not only so; the moderate sinuosity of the southeastern or under boundary of the Newark formation indicates clearly enough that the surface on which that portion of the formation lies is one of no great relief or inequality; and such a surface can be carved out of an elevated land only after long continued denudation, by which topographic development is carried beyond the time of its greatest strength or maturity into the fainter expression of old age. This is a matter of some importance in our study of the development of the rivers of Pennsylvania; and it also constitutes a good part of the evidence already referred to as indicating that there must have been some earlier deformations of importance in the southeastern part of the State; for it is hardly conceivable that the great Paleozoic