Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE GEOGRAPHICAL FEATURES OF NORTHERN FRANCE 10. The Paris Basin. The greater part of northern France is occupied by the so-called Paris basin, which gains its nameTHE PARIS BASIN 23 Fig. 4. The Paris Basin And Its Saddles from the basin-like slope of the rock layers from all sides towards Paris as a center. The relation between the rock layers and the surface forms here occurring is moreover in many ways so manifest and so significant, that an understanding of it aids the memory in placing a multitude of details in their proper position with respect to the larger features of which they are parts. The Bordering Uplands and Highlands. The stratified formations occupying the Paris basin lie, with a total thickness of hundreds or thousands of meters, upon a foundation of ancient and disordered rocks which emerge in four upland or highland areas of unequal size around the basin borders as shown in Fig. 4: these are the Armorican area on the west, which includes the peninsula of Brittany and an adjoining part of the mainland, the extensive Central Highlands on the south, the Vosges (German, Vogeseri) of comparatively small area on the east, and the Ardennes with their eastern extension into the Slate-mountain highlands (German, Schiefer- gebirge) on the northeast. It is highly probable that the strata of the Paris basin, shown in section across the middle of Fig. 4, once overlapped the four areas of ancient foundation rocks much farther than they do now, and that they have been worn back because those areas are regions of upheaval; the Paris basin, on the other hand, is a region of relative depression, where the covering strata, broadly overspreading the disordered foundation rocks, have been preserved; the oldest members of the basin series crop out aro...