XVI. On the Geology of Switzerland

Abstract

In these Notes on the Geology of Switzerland, the author embodied some observations made during a recent visit to that country. After remarking on the connection that exists between the scenery and the geology of a country, he alluded to the many eminent investigators who had illustrated the rock-formations of Switzerland—as Studer, Escher, E. de Beaumont, Favre, Desor, on the Continent, with Murchison, Lyell, Ramsay, and others of the English school. There also Charpentier, Rendu, Guyot, Agassiz, Forbes, and Tyndall had spent laborious but delightful days in studying the structure and action of glaciers. The “playground of Europe” had thus become classic ground to the geologist. He then gave an outline of the general structure of the country, in its three main divisions of the Jura mountains, the middle plain, and the Alpine districts, showing how the secondary rocks—oolitic and chalk—of the Jura are overlaid by tertiary strata (<i>Molasse</i>) in the middle plain, but reappear on the flanks of the Alps upheaved into lofty mountains, and are succeeded by mica-schist, gneiss, and granite, forming the central parts of the great Alpine chain and the back-bone of the European continent. The first point, accordingly, which struck one with regard to Swiss geology, was the comparatively recent age of these the loftiest mountains in Europe, composed as they are in great part of strata formed within the tertiary period. While our own higher mountains are made up of rocks belonging to an immense antiquity, the Alps, the Apennines, Pyrenees, Carpathians, in Europe,