72 NOTES ON A SUMMER TOUR IN NORWAY. 
Between the mainland and this wonderful wall of islets, which 
extends with but very few breaks from almost the southern 
extremity of Norway to the North Cape, is a series of connected 
sounds, or /eder as they are called, through which, sheltered frorn 
the boisterous storms of the North Sea, even lightly-built vessels 
can safely thread their way. These leder are of the highest 
importance to the coastal navigation of the country. 
I shall have something to say about the origin of this chain of 
islands, and of the fjords whose mouths they guard, but must first 
for a few minutes direct your attention to the distribution and 
structure of the mountain masses of the country. 
Here I must commence by correcting what I fear is a very 
wide-spread error, but one which most of our map-makers and 
many of our geographers have done their best to perpetuate. 
If we look at any ordinary educational map of Scandinavia we 
see distinct chains of mountains marked in the usual conventional 
manner, drawing their caterpillar-like lengths along, and forming, 
for a long distance, the boundary between Norway and Sweden. 
These exquisite pictures of caterpillars, in which map-makers 
delight, have seldom any resemblance to the plan of the 
mountains they are supposed to portray, but the idea which they 
give in this particular case is entirely erroneous. Norway, 
although justly considered a mountainous country, and possessing 
heights up to 8,500 feet, has no mountain ranges in the ordinary 
sense of the word, that is, no structural ranges like the Alps or 
the Himalayas, in which the general direction of the mountains is 
closely connected with, and indeed caused by, the earth move- 
ments which have folded and converted the strata constituting 
them. 
As I wish you to have a perfectly clear idea of what I mean by 
a structural range, I will call your attention to the diagram 
(Fig. 1) representing to true vertical and horizontal scale a section 
across the Alps. You see that although great masses of rock 
have beeh removed from the tops of the folds into which the 
rocks have been thrown, yet the mountain range still clearly 
shows in its general conformation the influence of the crumpling, 
