1. Mountain ranges are made of belts of enormously and exceptionally thick sediments. The strata of the Appalachians are thirty thousand feet thick, while the same formations thin out to five thousand feet in the Mississippi valley. The folds of the Wasatch Mountains involve strata thirty thousand feet thick, which thin to two thousand feet in the region of the Plains. 2. The sedimentary strata of which mountains are made are for the most part the shallow-water deposits of continental deltas. Mountain ranges have been upfolded along the margins of continents. 3. Shallow-water deposits of the immense thickness found in mountain ranges can be laid only in a gradually sinking area. A profound subsidence, often to be reckoned in tens of thousands of feet, precedes the upfolding of a mountain range. Thus the history of mountains of folding is as follows: For long ages the sea bottom off the coast of a continent slowly subsides, and the great trough, as fast as it forms, is filled with sediments, which at last come to be many thousands of feet thick. The downward movement finally ceases. A slow but resistless pressure sets in, and gradually, and with a long series of many intermittent movements, the vast mass of accumulated sediments is crumpled and uplifted into a mountain range. Fractures and Dislocations of the Crust Considering the immense stresses to which the rocks of the crust are subjected, it is not surprising to find that they often yield by fracture, like brittle bodies, instead of by folding and flowing, like plastic solids. Whether rocks bend or break depends on the character and condition of the rocks, the load of overlying rocks which they bear, and the amount of the force and the slowness with which it is applied. =Joints.= At the surface, where their load is least, we find rocks universally broken into blocks of greater or less size by partings known as joints. Under this name are included many division planes caused by cooling and drying; but it is now generally believed that the larger and more regular joints, especially those which run parallel to the dip and strike of the strata, are fractures due to up-and-down movements and foldings and twistings of the rocks. [Illustration: Fig. 183. Joints utilized by a River in widening its Valley, Iowa] Joints are used to great advantage in quarrying, and we have seen how they are utilized by the weather in breaking up rock masses, by rivers in widening their valleys, by the sea in driving back its cliffs, by glaciers in plucking their beds, and how they are enlarged in soluble rocks to form natural passageways for underground waters. The ends of the parted strata match along both sides of joint planes; in. joints there has been little or no displacement of the broken rocks. [Illustration: Fig. 184. A Normal Fault]