488 MR MILNE ON THE GEOLOGY OF ROXBURGHSHIRE. 



on the probable origin of these ridges ; and I have merely alluded to them now, in 

 order to explain the position of some fossil shells which I am about to describe." 



" They (the shells) occur at Solna, about a mile to the north-west of the city, 

 at the foot of one of the great ridges of sand and gravel before mentioned ; a 

 ridge which, passing southward, traverses the city of Stockholm, and is said to 

 have afforded fossil shells in the large pits at the Skantstull, in the southern 

 suburbs. These pits lie between the church of Solna and the public cemetery of 

 Stockholm. Both in the pits and in the adjoining ridge, the gravel and sand is 

 stratified, and in general no organic remains can be discovered in them ; but in 

 the pits, a little below the level of the road, there are some layers of loam mixed 

 with vegetable matter, where shells occur in abundance." 



Since, then, sea-shells occur, if not in the heart of these ridges, at all events 

 at the base of them, and in gravel manifestly of contemporaneous origin, it is im- 

 possible to doubt that, at least in Sweden, these gravel and sand banks have been 

 formed at the bottom of the sea ; and, accordingly, Mr LYELL had, in the year 

 1834, no doubt that these oasars were of marine production. 



Such being the character of these gravelly ridges, it seems not a little bold 

 and inconsistent in CHARPENTIER to lay down the proposition (I quote his words), 

 that " Oasars are Moraines, some having been formed by the oscillations to which 

 the great glacier was subjected during its retreat, others by the ice which remained 

 on elevated mountains and table-land, long after the low regions had been freed 

 from it."* 



On the contrary, it humbly appears to me, that these oasars of Scania, like 

 the horsebacks of America, and the kaims of Scotland, composed as they all are 

 chiefly of rounded pebbles and beds of sand, must have been formed by water, 

 and cannot have been detritus, either transported on the surface of, or pushed for- 

 wards by, glaciers. 



Mr POGGENDORFF, in an account of these oasars recently published in his 

 Annalen, mentions a circumstance which can leave no doubt as to their origin. 

 He says that they " always exhibit at their northern extremity, and only there, a 

 fixed standing rock ; a phenomenon which, on the assumption of a violent flood 

 from the north, has led to the conclusion, that it was these very rocks which, by 

 affording shelter from the flood, gave rise to the accumulation of the narrow and 

 far-extending alluvial hills."f 



Perhaps I may be allowed to mention, that, when I examined several of the 

 kaims in Roxburghshire and Berwickshire, it was in company with a valued 

 friend of AGASSIZ, and an able supporter of his Glacial Theory. Whilst he pro- 

 nounced at least two of these gravel ridges, viz. that in Liddesdale, and the 



* JAMESON'S Edinburgh Philosophical Journal for October 1843, p. 73. 

 t Ibid. vol. xxiii. p. 72. 



