Geikie quite naturally devotes several pages in his "Text-Book" to a description of these conditions in the Highlands; but from one of his first reports on these observations, published in _Nature_[29] we get some much more suggestive details. The thrust-planes, he says, are difficult to be "distinguished from ordinary stratification planes, like which they have been plicated, faulted, and denuded. Here and there, as a result of denudation, a portion of one of them =appears capping a hill-top=. One almost refuses to believe that the little outlier on the summit does not lie normally on the rocks below it, but on a nearly horizontal fault by which it has been moved into its place." Speaking of some similar conditions in Ross Shire, which he himself had previously described as naturally conformable, he declares:-- "=Had these sections been planned for the purpose of deception= they could not have been more skillfully devised ... and no one coming first to this ground would suspect that what appears to be a normal stratigraphical sequence is not really so." "When a geologist finds" things in this condition, he says, "he may be excused if he begins to wonder =whether he himself is not really standing on his head=." But I would only weary the reader by attempting to pursue this subject further. Those who wish to do so will find many additional examples in the larger works of Dana, LeConte, Prestwich, and Geikie, to say nothing of the more detailed statements buried in numerous Government Reports and special monographs in German and French. From the very same set of beds different observers try to explain these puzzles in very different ways. Some, like Helm, will describe gigantic overthrust folds, and will draw immense arcs of circles several miles high in the air, as the place where the rocks must once have been. Others, like Rothpletz, from an examination of the very same rocks, will cut the mountain up into sections with imaginary fault-planes, and will tell how, in the district about Glarus for example, an enormous mass of mountains "travelled from east to west a distance of about twenty-five miles from the Rhine valley to the Linth," or how the "Rhatikon Mountain mass travelled from Montafon valley to the Rhine valley, about nineteen miles from east to west."[30] With regard to some at least of these conditions in the Alps, Geikie virtually admits that these incredible and self-contradictory earth-movements are necessitated by and described from fossil evidence only, for he says:-- "... the strata could scarcely be supposed to have been really inverted, save for the evidence (_sic_) as to their true order of succession supplied by their included fossils." "... portions of Carboniferous strata appear as if regularly interbedded among Jurassic rocks, and indeed could not be separated save after a study of their enclosed organic remains."[31]