"Had these sections been planned for the purpose of deception, they could not have been more skilfully devised, ... and no one coming first to the ground would suspect that what appears to be a normal stratigraphical sequence is not really so."[43] [Footnote 42: "Manual," pp. 111, 534.] [Footnote 43: _Nature_, November 13, 1884, pp. 29-35.] Here again we have unequivocal testimony from the most competent of observers that there is _no physical evidence whatever_ to lead any one to say that a ponderous scale of the earth's crust was really pushed up on top of other portions, as this makeshift theory of "thrust faults" involves. The _fossils are here in the wrong order_, just as in the case at Glarus; that is all. The facts seem to be a flat contradiction to the theory of definite successive ages, and to save the theory this explanation of a "thrust fault" is invented, though there is absolutely no physical evidence of any disturbance of the strata. Our next stopping place is in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia. Here we have the Carboniferous strata dipping gently to the southeast, like an ordinary low monocline, _under_ Cambrian or Lower Silurian, one of these so-called faults having a reported length of 375 miles,[44] while in another instance the upper strata are said to have been pushed about eleven miles in the direction of the "thrust."[45] These conditions, we are told, "have provoked the wonder of the most experienced geologists,"[46] because of the perfectly natural appearance of the surfaces of the strata affected; or as this same writer puts it, "The mechanical effort is great beyond comprehension, but the effect upon the rocks is inappreciable," and "the fault dip is often parallel to the bedding of the one or the other series of strata."[47] Which means, in other words, that these "thrust planes" _look just like ordinary planes of bedding between conformable strata_. [Footnote 44: Bailey Willis, Geol. Survey, Report, Vol. 13, p. 228.] [Footnote 45: C.W. Hayes, _Bull. Geol. Soc_., Vol. 2, pp. 141-154.] [Footnote 46: Willis, _op. cit_., p. 228.] [Footnote 47: Willis, _op. cit_., p. 227.]