138 THE OCEAN. 



nearer our historical time the fjords of Scandinavia have been in 

 their turn freed from the glaciers that filled them, whilst quite in the 

 extreme north and in the Antarctic regions there are countries where 

 the rivers of ice still descend into the sea, and stretch far into the 

 gulfs. The glacier of the Bay of Magdalene, which Messrs Martins 

 and Bravais have explored, projects far into a fjord which is 55 

 fathoms deep, and the terminal cliff of ice, driven out by the weight 

 of the upper snows, presents a curved line, turning its convexity 

 towards the open sea. On still colder coasts, such as the north 

 of Greenland, and at the South Pole, the outline of the Antarctic 

 countries, even tlie bays are entirely filled up with ice, and this run- 

 ning into the sea gives a regular outline to the whole coast. The 

 waves of the open sea dash against a long wall of crj^stal, and the 

 icy layers disguise the true form of the architecture of the con- 

 tinents, as the fluvial alluvium and marine sandbanks do in other 

 climates. Nevertheless deep valle}' s, hidden by the ice-fields, are also 

 cut into the line of tlicse Polar coasts too, and in a future geological 

 period, when the ice shall have disappeared, tliese incisions of the 

 continent will become in their turn fjords, similar to those of Scan- 

 dinavia. 



At the epoch when the bays of Scandinavia were filled with ice as 

 those of northern Greenland are in our days, they preserved their 

 primitive form, excepting that the lateral walls and the rocks at the 

 bottom were grooved and polished by the friction of the mass in move- 

 ment and the fragments which it carried with it. The blocks of 

 stone fallen on the snow, and on the surface of the glacier, the heaps 

 of pebbles and earth torn by storms and thaws from the sides of the 

 mountain, formed moraines exactly similar to those which are now 

 seen on the diminished glaciers of the Scandinavian mountains. But 

 these moraines, instead of crumbling away with the ice, in some 

 valleys thousands of feet above the sea, were carried to the very mouths 

 of the fjords in the open sea, and plunged into the middle of the waves 

 with the pieces detached from the glacier itself. The successive 

 debris of rocks and jDebbles must necessarily gradually raise the 

 frontal submarine moraine, and in fact at the entrance of all the 

 Scandina\ian fjords, heaps of deposit are found rising like ramparts 

 out of the deep water. The seamen of Norway give the name of *' sea 

 gates " to these natural barricades, which serve as limit to the ancient 

 glaciers, and where the fish from the neighbouring waters assemble in 

 myriads. Off the coasts of western Scotland, as at the entrance to the 

 small gulfs of Finisterre, the ridges of submarine banks and reefs are 



