164 CHAPTER OF VARIETIES. 



along 1 the coasts of the Baltic had in many localities taken place, could 

 not reasonably be disputed. He then considered if it were possible that 

 the level of the Baltic could have fallen, being, by its connection with 

 the North Sea, a branch of the great ocean ; and concluded, from the 

 permanency of the respective level of the land and water on the coasts 

 of Pomerania, among- the Danish islands, and at some points on the 

 shores of Finland, that the level of the Baltic Sea had undergone no 

 change of level for the last six hundred years. The change observable 

 on the coasts of Sweden, therefore, must be due to an elevation of the 

 land, now gradually, though insensibly, in progress. This rising is 

 estimated to proceed at present at the rate of about one foot in twenty- 

 five years. 



The absence of any record of violent volcanic action in the Scandi- 

 navian Peninsula renders it improbable that the rise is due to such a 

 cause. The author referred it, therefore, to the gradual cooling of the 

 crust of the earth, which, by causing a contraction and compression in 

 parts where the cooling was a maximum, tended to elevate other por- 

 tions of the earth's surface at points or in lines of minimum resistance. 



The centre of the action in Scandinavia he considered to be in the 

 mountain chains which traverse Norway, and Sweden, and Finland 

 respectively ; and which are mutually connected beyond the head of the 

 Bothnian Gulf; and attributing the original elevation of these chains, 

 with Elie de Beaumont, to the secular refrigeration of the earth, he 

 found in the rise still observable in Scandinavia a relic only of that once 

 powerful action by which these mountain ranges were originally pro- 

 jected. He suggested the probability also, that on other coasts where 

 high mountain ridges ran parallel with the sea, accurate measurements 

 of the mean level of the water, in reference to the scarped rocks on the 

 coast, if repeated at certain distant intervals, might make known other 

 gradual elevations still in progress, similar to those observable on the 

 shores of the Baltic. 



The Editor's HAND BOOK OF ALLOTMENT AGRICULTURE is now 

 in the Press, and will contain a new rationale of the effects of fallowing, 

 hitherto so much misunderstood among agricultural writers. 



