In this last-named essential feature, the Prealpes do not differ from the still greater limestone Alps which succeed them to the south. These giants, _e.g._ the Jungfrau, Wetterhorn, Eiger, etc., are also without local foundations. They have been formed from the overthrown and drawn-out anticlines of great crust-folds, whose synclines or roots are traceable to the south side of the Rhone Valley. The Bernese Oberland originated in the piling-up of four great sheets or recumbent folds, one of which is continued into the Prealpes. With Lugeon[2] we may see in the phenomenon of the formation of the Prealpes a detail; regarding it as a normal expression of that mechanism which has created the Swiss Alps. For these limestone masses of the Oberland are not indications of a merely local shift of the sedimentary covering of the Alps. Almost the whole covering has [1] De Lapparent, _Traite de Geologie_, p. 1,785. [2] Lugeon, _Bulletin Soc. Geol. de France_, 1901, p. 772. 151 been pushed over and piled up to the north. Lugeon[l] concludes that, before denudation had done its work and cut off the Prealpes from their roots, there would have been found sheets, to the number of eight, superimposed and extending between the Mont Blanc massif and the massif of the Finsteraarhorn: these sheets being the overthrown folds of the wrinkled sedimentary covering. The general nature of the alpine structure {Fig. 8} will be understood from the presentation of it diagrammatically after Schmidt of Basel (Fig. 8).[2] The section extends from north to south, and brings out the relations of the several recumbent folds. We must imagine almost the whole of these superimposed folds now removed from the central regions of the Alps by denudation, [1] Lugeon, _loc. cit._ [2] Schmidt, _Ec. Geol. Helvetiae_, vol. ix., No. 4. 152 and leaving the underlying gneisses rising through the remains of Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic sediments; while to the north the great limestone mountains and further north still, the Prealpes, carved from the remains of the recumbent folds, now stand with almost as little resemblance to the vanished mountains as the memories of the past have to its former intense reality. These views as to the origin of the Alps, which are shared at the present day by so many distinguished geologists, had their origin in the labours of many now gone; dating back to Studer; finding their inspiration in the work of Heim, Suess, and Marcel Bertrand; and their consummation in that of Lugeon, Schardt, Rothpletz, Schmidt, and many others. Nor must it be forgotten that nearer home, somewhat similar phenomena, necessarily on a smaller scale, were recognised by Lapworth, twenty-six years ago, in his work on the structure of the Scottish Highlands.