Eogers.] 244 



above the sea-level. The letter assures me that critical surveys con- 

 ducted for a long while past, prove, that while the dry-land near the 

 mouth of the Gulf of Finland, is, and has been rising at the rate of 

 two feet per century, that near Lake Ladoga is lifting at the rate of 

 four feet, and all the surface further north than this at the still swifter 

 pace of five English feet each century. 



These data are in strict accord with all that we have been long 

 ago taught of the gradual rising of all the west coast of Scandinavia, 

 for one thousand miles from near Stockholm in Southern Sweden, to 

 North Cape in Lapland, at rates augmenting as we go north, and be- 

 ing in high latitudes in Norway as rapid as three feet English, per 

 century. 



Such satisfactory confirmations of my theory have been very grati- 

 fying to me. Supposing the wide neck of land centrally occupied by 

 Lake Onega, has been rising in the past no fester than at present, we 

 go back only forty centuries, or four thousand years, to a state of the 

 surface, at which the Arctic Ocean and the North Sea of Britain, 

 were joined by an enormous marine strait or channel, wider than the 

 present Baltic, and stretching irom the White Sea of Archangel, 

 southwestward, across Finland and over Southern Sweden, all Den- 

 mark and Holland, into the North Sea. Going a Kttle farther back in 

 time, to, say more than six thousand years ago, or to an epoch just, 

 antecedent to the generally supposed first appearance of mankind 

 upon our earth, and we are in conditions of the physical geography 

 of Western Europe which quadrate admirably with all the geological 

 relics yet gathered of the immediately Prehuman Period. 



Judging from the existing very flat and low profile of all the dis- 

 trict bordering the Baltic, and assumed by me to have been flooded by 

 the great northeast Arctic current, I infer that its average breadth 

 was little less than four hundred miles. 



I deem it superfluous to attempt any detailed explanation of the 

 influences such a vast broad stream of icy and ice-floating Arctic 

 water would possess in promoting a southward distribution of North- 

 ern plants and animals, and a very abnormal precipitation of snow in 

 the Alps, and on many of the lofty mountain tracts of Europe. We 

 need but turn and gaze to the refrigerating and glacier-making agen- 

 cies of the North American Arctic currents, to interpret at once the 

 chilling and snow-producing powers of this assumed outpouring of the 

 Arctic Sea through the Baltic against France and Britain. 



If space permitted. I could cite many instances of the far convey- 

 ance of huge, angular blocks, of various mineral composition, to local- 

 ities where all geologists Avho have beheld them have been constrained 

 to assert that they could have reached the points where they lie by no 

 conceivable agency but that of floating ice. Murchison speaks of one 



