n chains, with their latitude, and respective
heights in English feet.

_Name._ _Degrees of Latitude._ _Height._

{ _Altai Mountains_ 17 deg. to 28 13,000ft.
Southern { _Cordilleras_ 10 to 20 12,000
Hemisphere. { _Pyrenees_ 8 to 18 12,000
{ _Riphean_ 5 to 10 2,600

{ _Haemus_ 10 to 20 6,300
{ _Carpathian_ 15 to 19 6,000
{ _Apennines_ 14 to 27 18,000
Northern { _Taurus_ 25 to 34 8,500
Hemisphere. { _Hercynian_ 17 to 29 3,400
{ _Caucasus_ 33 to 40 17,000
{ _Alps_ 42 to 30 10,000

Of these different chains, the most important is that of the
_Apennines_, about 450 miles long, a length, however, far inferior to
that of many of the great mountain ranges of our globe. They skirt the
western shores of the _Mare Imbrium_, over which they rise in immense
cliffs, 18 or 20 thousand feet in height, steep as a wall and casting
over the plain intensely black shadows at least 90 miles long. Of Mt.
_Huyghens_, the highest in the group, the travellers were just barely
able to distinguish the sharp angular summit in the far west. To the
east, however, the _Carpathians_, extending from the 18th to 30th
degrees of east longitude, lay directly under their eyes and could be
examined in all the peculiarities of their distribution.

Barbican proposed a hypothesis regarding the formation of those
mountains, which his companions thought at least as good as any other.
Looking carefully over the _Carpathians_ and catching occasional
glimpses of semi-circular formations and half domes, he concluded that
the chain must have formerly been a succession of vast craters. Then had
come some mighty internal discharge, or rather the subsidence to which
_Mare Imbrium_ is due, for it immediately broke off or swallowed up one
half of those mountains, leaving the other half steep as a wall on one
side and sloping gently on the other to the level of the surrounding
plains. The _Carpathians_ were therefore pretty nearly in the same
condition as the crater mountains _Ptolemy_, _Alpetragius_ and
_Arzachel_ would find themselves in, if some terrible cataclysm, by
tearing awa