MODIFICATIONS OF THE COAST- LINE. 131 



line of the sliore has not ceased to oscillate, encroaching here on the 

 waters of the ocean, and there on the continental surface. The 

 action of the sea is double : it is constantly re-touching the contours 

 of its basin, either by wearing away the rocks that border it and 

 carrying away the strand, or by casting up on its coast the alluvium 

 and wreck of every kind that it tosses in its waves. All that it en- 

 gulfs on one side it gives back elsewhere under another form. 



Before the sea had modified its shores by destroying peninsulas 

 and filling up bays and estuaries, the form of the coast was cer- 

 tainly much less regular than it is now in the outline of most countries. 

 If the marine waters were raised by a sudden revolution to 100 or 200 

 yards above their present level, the ocean, inundating all the river 

 valleys to a very great distance from the present shores, would sud- 

 denly enter in elongated gulfs into the depressions of the continent, 

 and change all the valleys and lateral gorges into bays. In the place 

 of each of those river-mouths which hardly indent the normal line of 

 the coast, deep hollows would be opened,* dividing into numberless 

 ramifications. But a work in the opposite direction will instantly be 

 commenced when this change in the outline of the shores is accom- 

 plished. On the one side, the water-courses, bringing down their 

 alluvium, will gradually fill the upper valleys, and little by little 

 restrict the domain of the maritime conquests. On the other side, 

 the ocean will also labour by its dunes along the coast, its banks of 

 sand or shingle, to take away from its surface all those new bays that 

 the sudden increase of its waters had given it. After an indefinite 

 lapse of centuries, the shore would finally re-assume the gently un- 

 dulated form that the greater number of coasts now present. 



There are still many countries where this double work of the sea 

 and the continental waters has hardly commenced. Those lands 

 whose coast-line, thus preserving its first form, is still deeply in- 

 dented, are all situated at a great distance from the equator, in the 

 neighbourhood of the Polar zone. In Europe, the western coasts of 

 Scandinavia, from the promontory of Lindesnaes to the North Cape, 

 are jagged by a series of these fjords* or ramified gulfs, and not 

 only the shore of the continent, but all those islands also which form 

 a sort of chain parallel to the Norwegian plateau, are fringed with 

 peninsulas and cut into by small fjords, winding in immense passages. 

 Among these indentations, ^hich increase the length of the coast ten- 

 fold, and give to the coast-line a border of innumerable peninsulas, 

 more or less parallel, some are pretty uniform in aspect, and resemble 

 * Called in Scotland, firths. 

 K 2 



