THE "GREAT ICE AGE.'' 173 



A further question in this direction suggested itself on the 

 g pot viz. what is the nature of the " banks' 1 which constitute 

 the fishing-grounds of Norway, Iceland, Newfoundland, etc. 

 They are submarine plains unquestionably they must have a 

 high degree of fertility in order to supply food for the hun- 

 dreds of millions of voracious codfish, coal- fish, haddocks, 

 halibut, etc. that people them. These large fishes all feed on 

 the bottom, their chief food being mollusca and Crustacea, which 

 must find, either directly or indirectly, some pasture of vegeta- 

 ble origin. The banks are, in fact, great meadows or feeding 

 grounds for the lower animals which support the higher. 



From the Lofoten bank alone twenty millions of codfish are 

 taken annually, besides those devoured by the vast multitude 

 of sea-birds. Now this bank is situated precisely where, ac- 

 cording to the above-stated view of the origin of the till, there 

 should be a huge deposit. It occupies the Vest fiord i.e. the 

 opening between the mainland and the Lofoden Islands, ex- 

 tending from Moskenes, to Lodingen on Ilindo, just where the 

 culminating masses of the Kjolen Mountains must have poured 

 their greatest glaciers into the sea by a westward course, and 

 these glaciers must have been met by another stream pouring 

 from the north, formed by the glaciers of Hindo and Senjeno, 

 and both must have coalesced with a third flood pouring 

 through the Ofoten fiord, the Tys fiord, etc., from the main- 

 land. The Vest fiord is about sixty miles wide at its mouth, 

 and narrows northward till it terminates in the Ofoten fiord, 

 which forks into several branches eastward. A glance at a 

 good map will show that here, according to my explanation of 

 the origin of the till, there should be the greatest of all the 

 submarine plains of till which the ancient Scandinavian glaciers 

 have produced, and of which the plains of till I saw on the 

 coast at Bodo (which lies just at the mouth of the Vest fiord, 

 where the Salten fiord flows into it), are but the slightly in- 

 clined continuation. 



Some idea of this bank may be formed from the fact that 

 outside of the Lofodcns the sea is 100 to 200 fathoms in depth, 

 that it suddenly shoals up to 16 or 20 fathoms on the east side 

 of these rocks, and this shallow plain extends across the whole 

 50 or 60 miles between these islands and the mainland.* It 



* The celebrated " Maelstrom" is one of the currents that flow- 

 down the submarine incline between these islands when the tide is 

 falling. Although I have ridiculed some of the accounts of this now 

 innocent stream, I am not prepared to assert that it was always as mild 



