It is not reasonable to believe that when the rocks of the Piedmont were thus folded and otherwise deformed the surface of the region was a plain. The upturned layers have not always stopped abruptly at the even surface of the Piedmont plain which now cuts across them. They are the bases of great folds and tilted blocks which must once have risen high in air. The complex and disorderly structures of the Piedmont rocks are those seen in great mountain ranges, and there is every reason to believe that these rocks after their deformation rose to mountain height. The ancient Piedmont plain cuts across these upturned rocks as independently of their structure as the even surface of the sawed stump of some great tree is independent of the direction of its fibers. Hence the Piedmont plain as it was before its uplift was not a coastal plain formed of strata spread in horizontal sheets beneath the sea and then uplifted; nor was it a structural plain, due to the resistance to erosion of some hard, flat-lying layer of rock. Even surfaces developed on rocks of discordant structure, such as the Piedmont shows, are produced by long denudation, and we may consider the Piedmont as a peneplain formed by the wearing down of mountain ranges, and recently uplifted. THE LAURENTIAN PENEPLAIN. This is the name given to a denuded surface on very ancient rocks which extends from the Arctic Ocean to the St. Lawrence River and Lake Superior, with small areas also in northern Wisconsin and New York. Throughout this U-shaped area, which incloses Hudson Bay within its arms, the country rocks have the complicated and contorted structures which characterize mountain ranges. But the surface of the area is by no means mountainous. The sky line when viewed from the divides is unbroken by mountain peaks or rugged hills. The surface of the arm west of Hudson Bay is gently undulating and that of the eastern arm has been roughened to low-rolling hills and dissected in places by such deep river gorges as those of the Ottawa and Saguenay. This immense area may be regarded as an ancient peneplain truncating the bases of long-vanished mountains and dissected after elevation. In the examples cited the uplift has been a broad one and to comparatively little height. Where peneplains have been uplifted to great height and have since been well dissected, and where they have been upfolded and broken and uptilted, their recognition becomes more difficult. Yet recent observers have found evidences of ancient lowland surfaces of erosion on the summits of the Allegheny ridges, the Cascade Mountains (Fig. 69), and the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas.