Rate of folding.  All the facts known with regard to rock deformation agree that it is a secular process, taking place so slowly that, like the deepening of valleys by erosion, it escapes the notice of the inhabitants of the region.  It is only under stresses slowly applied that rocks bend without breaking.  The folds of some of the highest mountains have risen so gradually that strong, well-intrenched rivers which had the right of way across the region were able to hold to their courses, and as a circular saw cuts its way through the log which is steadily driven against it, so these rivers sawed their gorges through the fold as fast as it rose beneath them.  Streams which thus maintain the course which they had antecedent to a deformation of the region are known as antecedent streams.  Examples of such are the Sutlej and other rivers of India, whose valleys trench the outer ranges of the Himalayas and whose earlier river deposits have been upturned by the rising ridges.  On the other hand, mountain crests are usually divides, parting the head waters of different drainage systems.  In these cases the original streams of the region have been broken or destroyed by the uplift of the mountain mass across their paths.

On the whole, which have worked more rapidly, processes of deformation or of denudation?

LAND FORMS DUE TO FOLDING

As folding goes on so slowly, it is never left to form surface features unmodified by the action of other agencies.  An anticlinal fold is attacked by erosion as soon as it begins to rise above the original level, and the higher it is uplifted, and the stronger are its slopes, the faster is it worn away.  Even while rising, a young upfold is often thus unroofed, and instead of appearing as a long, Smooth, boat-shaped ridge, it commonly has had opened along the rocks of the axis, when these are weak, a valley which is overlooked by the infacing escarpments of the hard layers of the sides of the fold.  Under long-continued erosion, anticlines may be degraded to valleys, while the synclines of the same system may be left in relief as ridges.

Folded mountains.  The vastness of the forces which wrinkle the crust is best realized in the presence of some lofty mountain range.  All mountains, indeed, are not the result of folding.  Some, as we shall see, are due to upwarps or to fractures of the crust; some are piles of volcanic material; some are swellings caused by the intrusion of molten matter beneath the surface; some are the relicts left after the long denudation of high plateaus.

But most of the mountain ranges of the earth, and some of the greatest, such as the Alps and the Himalayas, were originally mountains of folding.  The earth’s crust has wrinkled into a fold; or into a series of folds, forming a series of parallel ridges and intervening valleys; or a number of folds have been mashed together into a vast upswelling of the crust, in which the layers have been so crumpled and twisted, overturned and crushed, that it is exceedingly difficult to make out the original structure.