558. There must be therefore valleys or parallel valleys, which probably extend for hundreds of miles, and are many miles deep--Longitudinal valleys.
559. The laminæ of the earth had without doubt transverse fissures, which have been called hidden passages. These transverse fissures are the transverse valleys, which are consequently less long and deep.
560. The mountains originate of themselves. They do not properly originate, but valleys only originate, and the ridges of the crystal laminæ afford the mountains. The mountains have not been originally upheaved above the surface of the earth, nor the valleys depressed. A valley, which is several miles broad, must originally have been several miles deep, and the mountain wall consequently several miles high. The earth at its origin was a cloven and jagged polyhedron, a polyhedric star, such as the moon is still.
561. The mountains are not therefore large crystals, which crystallized above the surface of the earth. They are only crystal laminæ, and may be as irregular as possible in form; for they are ruptured crystals.
562. The water, which from the beginning had covered the polyhedron, now sunk into the primary valleys. From the water resulted new and final crystallizations, and these deposited themselves in the valleys, upon the level ground and the flanks of the mountains; and thus the fathomless primary valleys have been in part filled up. There are no longer any primary valleys upon the earth.
563. After the water was once confined in narrow canals, it must begin to flow, and by the force of its current many a steep primary wall must have fallen in, been crumbled into ruins, and either been left upon the spot or washed away--Diluvial drift rocks (Trümmersteine), Nagelfluhe, Stratified rocks.
564. The principal direction of the water was formerly, as it is even now, determined by the rotation of the earth; it flowed therefore from east to west under the equator, from north-east to south-west in our temperate zones, and pretty well from the north or from the poles toward the equator in the frigid zones.
565. The primary valleys, which had originated in these directions, were more excavated by aqueous agency than those which ran in other directions, new valleys being also produced; the mountain chains therefore upon the earth agree in the main with the water courses, and, though not generated from, have been certainly changed in character by, the latter. Such must be our conclusion, if in the formation of the earth nothing but crystallization be taken into consideration. Condensation alone brings yet other phenomena along with it.