As folding goes on so slowly, it is never left to form surface features unmodified by the action of other agencies. An anticlinal fold is attacked by erosion as soon as it begins to rise above the original level, and the higher it is uplifted, and the stronger are its slopes, the faster is it worn away. Even while rising, a young upfold is often thus unroofed, and instead of appearing as a long, Smooth, boat-shaped ridge, it commonly has had opened along the rocks of the axis, when these are weak, a valley which is overlooked by the infacing escarpments of the hard layers of the sides of the fold. Under long-continued erosion, anticlines may be degraded to valleys, while the synclines of the same system may be left in relief as ridges. FOLDED MOUNTAINS. The vastness of the forces which wrinkle the crust is best realized in the presence of some lofty mountain range. All mountains, indeed, are not the result of folding. Some, as we shall see, are due to upwarps or to fractures of the crust; some are piles of volcanic material; some are swellings caused by the intrusion of molten matter beneath the surface; some are the relicts left after the long denudation of high plateaus. But most of the mountain ranges of the earth, and some of the greatest, such as the Alps and the Himalayas, were originally mountains of folding. The earth's crust has wrinkled into a fold; or into a series of folds, forming a series of parallel ridges and intervening valleys; or a number of folds have been mashed together into a vast upswelling of the crust, in which the layers have been so crumpled and twisted, overturned and crushed, that it is exceedingly difficult to make out the original structure. The close and intricate folds seen in great mountain ranges were formed, as we have seen, deep below the surface, within the zone of folding. Hence they may never have found expression in any individual surface features. As the result of these deformations deep under ground the surface was broadly lifted to mountain height, and the crumpled and twisted mountain structures are now to be seen only because erosion has swept away the heavy cover of surface rocks under whose load they were developed. When the structure of mountains has been deciphered it is possible to estimate roughly the amount of horizontal compression which the region has suffered. If the strata of the folds of the Alps were smoothed out, they would occupy a belt seventy-four miles wider than that to which they have been compressed, or twice their present width. A section across the Appalachian folds in Pennyslvania shows a compression to about two thirds the original width; the belt has been shortened thirty-five miles in every hundred. Considering the thickness of their strata, the compression which mountains have undergone accounts fully for their height, with enough to spare for all that has been lost by denudation.