the etching of Tertiary valleys in a Cretaceous baselevelled lowland, then we may well conclude with Powell that "mountains cannot remain long as mountains; they are ephemeral topographic forms."[1]
Part Third. General conception of the history of a river.
15. The complete cycle of river life: youth, adolescence, maturity and old age.—The general outline of an ideal river's history may be now considered, preparatory to examining the special history of the rivers of Pennsylvania, as controlled by the geological events just narrated.
Rivers are so long lived and survive with more or less modification so many changes in the attitude and even in the structure of the land, that the best way of entering on their discussion seems to be to examine the development of an ideal river of simple history, and from the general features thus discovered, it may then be possible to unravel the complex sequence of events that leads to the present condition of actual rivers of complicated history.
A river that is established on a new land may be called an original river. It must at first be of the kind known as a consequent river, for it has no ancestor from which to be derived. Examples of simple original rivers may be seen in young plains, of which southern New Jersey furnishes a fair illustration. Examples of essentially original rivers may be seen also in regions of recent and rapid displacement, such as the Jura or the broken country of southern Idaho, where the directly consequent character of the drainage leads us to conclude that, if any rivers occupied these regions before their recent deformation, they were so completely extinguished by the newly made slopes that we see nothing of them now.
Once established, an original river advances through its long life, manifesting certain peculiarities of youth, maturity and old age, by which its successive stages of growth may be recognized without much difficulty. For the sake of simplicity, let us suppose the land mass, on which an original river has begun its work, stands perfectly still after its first elevation or deformation, and so remains until the river has completed its task of carrying away all the mass of rocks that rise above its baselevel. This lapse of time will be called a cycle in the life of a river. A complete
- ↑ Geol. Uinta Mountains, 1876, 196.
