This is especially marked in the Snake River plain of Idaho, in the western United States.  In this, and the adjoining regions of Oregon and Washington, an enormous tract of country has been overflowed by lava in a late geological period, the surface covered being estimated to have a larger area than France and Great Britain combined.  The Snake River cuts through it in a series of picturesque gorges and rapids, enabling us to estimate its thickness, which is considered to average 4000 feet.  Looked at from any point on its surface, one of these lava-plains appears as a vast level surface, like that of a lake bottom.  This uniformity has been produced either by the lava rolling over a plain or lake bottom, or by the complete effacement of an original, undulating contour of the ground under hundreds or thousands of feet of lava in successive sheets.  The lava, rolling up to the base of the mountains, has followed the sinuosities of their margin, as the waters of a lake follow its promontories and bays.  Similar conditions exist along the Sierra Nevada range of California, and to some extent placer mining has gone on under immense beds of lava, by a process of tunneling beneath the volcanic rock.

In some localities the volcanoes are of such height and dimensions as to overlook and dwarf the mountain-ranges by the side of which they lie.  Some of the volcanoes lying parallel to the great American axis appear to be quite extinct, while others are in full activity.  In the Eastern continent we find still more striking examples of parallelism between great mountain-chains and the lands along which volcanic activity is exhibited—­volcanoes, active or extinct, following the line of the great east and west chains which extend through southern Europe and Asia.  There are some other volcanic bands which exhibit a similar parallelism with mountain chains; but, on the other hand, there are volcanoes between which and the nearest mountain-axis no such connection can be traced.

AREAS OF UPHEAVAL AND SUBSIDENCE

There is one other fact concerning the mode of distribution of volcanoes upon the surface of the globe, to which we must allude.  By a study of the evidences presented by coral-reefs, raised beaches, submerged forests, and other phenomena of a similar kind, it can be shown that certain wide areas of the land and of the ocean-floor are at the present time in a state of subsidence, while other equally large areas are being upheaved.  And the observations of the geologist prove that similar upward and downward movements of portions of the earth’s crust have been going on through all geological times.

Now, as Mr. Darwin has so well shown in his work on “Coral Reefs,” if we trace upon a map the areas of the earth’s surface which are undergoing upheaval and subsidence respectively, we shall find that nearly all the active volcanoes of the globe are situated upon rising areas and that volcanic phenomena are conspicuously absent from those parts of the earth’s crust which can be proved at the present day to be undergoing depression.