Excerpt from Miscellaneous Papers on Forestry From Annual Report, Department of Agriculture for 1896

If these folds, or ridges and mountains, did not exist, the earth's surface would be a monotonous plain, practically everywhere equally distant from the centre of the earth, except in so far as that dis tance was modified by the differences between the polar and the equatorial diameters of the earth. Our streams would flow slowly in the Northern hemisphere toward the northeast, and in the South ern hemisphere toward the southeast, and the large masses of water would gravitate to the poles, as those would be the portions of the earth least remote from the earth's centre. The continental land masses would tend to be in the equatorial diameter of the globe because the land there would be the highest, i. E., most distant from the earth's centre.

The introduction, however, of these shrinkage folds, which we now recognize as mountains, completely changes these relations. Water will flow downward along the lines of least resistance, and as it flows will wear away the soil first and the rock next, in exact proportion, other things being equal, to the rapidity of its flow. We see this in the washes on our hillsides and in the constantly changing courses of our stream channels. But other things are not equal. If they were, the tendency to the formation of ravines and gulches, by erosion, would not exist, and everywhere over an equal slope the wearing away of the soil would proceed evenly, and the unbroken character of the country would in great measure be preserved, or more properly speaking, the tendency to an even reduction of our mountains would everywhere exist.

As it is, vast discrepancies in the character of soils and rocks occur; some yielding to erosion by flowing water more easily than others - and it is along such lines of least resistance that currents of equal velocity carve out their valley channels to the ocean, following, of course (in most instances) the trend of the larger valleys made by the folds in the earth's crust.

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