244 THE FOREST LANDS OF FINLAND. 



produce of the year lost, but the soil itself is so soaked 

 that for many years thereafter no crop can be raised. 

 Another interruption to agriculture is the constant rolling 

 down of stones from the heights which occurs everywhere.' 



SECTION B. INDICATIONS OF GLACIAL ACTION. 



In reference to the fact that Finland has been called, 

 and called with some propriety, ' The last-born daughter of 

 the sea,' I have, borrowing a statement from Dr. Ignatius, 

 in which it is said : ' If we call Finland a young country 

 in the sense that of the countries with which it is con- 

 nected it has been, perhaps, the last of all to be raised 

 above the level of the sea, and fitted to serve as a dwelling- 

 place for man, it is in this sense alone.' In connection 

 with the statement cited, Dr. Ignatius, goes on to say : 



' This epithet is not at all applicable to it in regard to 

 its geological formation. If we take into account the 

 periods of vast duration which have preceded the appear- 

 ance of man, and of the vegetables and animals with which 

 we are contemporary, then Finland is a very old land 

 indeed. In point of fact, its mountains are all of them of 

 primitive formation ; they are composed of gneiss, por- 

 phyre, syenite, diorite, euphotide, hyperite, and other allied 

 metamorphic formations, of a more ancient Laurentian 

 formation of gneiss, and of a more recent Huronian for- 

 mation of slate. There remain no traces of vegetable or 

 animal life from the remote ages in which these mountains 

 were formed ; no fossils ; no coal. Geologists admit that 

 in the primary, secondary, and tertiary periods, Finland 

 stood above the waste of waters, but bare and desert, and 

 that during the whole of this latter period she was, as 

 Greenland is at present, covered with an immense glacier, 

 which kept advancing to the south-east by a slow, almost 

 imperceptible movement. Under the weight of these ice 

 masses the ground was pressed down; but afterwards, 

 the glaciers receding, the ground began to rise again. Long 

 and narrow chains of mounds of a formation posterior to 



