12 



"before the ages indicated by the employment of bronze and of iron in 

 the manufacture of weapons, utensils, and ornaments ; but at what period 

 of time they lived we have not as yet the means of determining. 

 " We cannot," says a writer on the antiquity of man, " prove that the 

 Danish firs, and subsequently the Danish oaks, took a long time for 

 their successive disappearance. It may, in each case, have been 

 100,000 years, or it may have been ten times as long; but it is not 

 impossible that it may have been in a much shorter time ; but it is 

 alleged that these Danish fishermen were not the primitive race of 

 men, for their flint implements are polished, and belong to what anti- 

 quarians designate the Neolithic period, which was preceded, if not in 

 Denmark, elsewhere in Europe, by what is designated the Palaeolithic 

 period, during which the stone implements were unpolished and com- 

 paratively rude. These have been traced, or attributed, to a very 

 remote antiquity, about which geologists as yet can talk but vaguely 

 of the chronological landmarks by which its dates may be indicated. 



The elevation of part of Denmark above the level of the sea may 

 have been a comparatively recent occurrence, viewed in relation to 

 occurrences indicated by geological phenomena not very remote. Sir 

 Charles Lyell, in his "Principles of Geology" (9 ed. chap, xxx.), 

 shows that the upward movement now in progress in parts of Norway 

 and Sweden extends throughout an area of about 1,000 miles north 

 and south, and for an unknown distance east and west, the amount of 

 elevation always increasing as we proceed towards the North Cape, 

 where it is said to equal five feet in a century. 



" If we could assume," he says, " that there had been an average rise of 

 two and a half feet in each hundred years for the last fifty centuries, this 

 would give an elevation of 125 feet in that period. In other words, it would 

 follow that the shores, and a considerable area of the former land, of the North 

 Sea had been uplifted vertically to that amount and converted into land in 

 the course of the last 5,000 years." 



Referring to certain post-tertiary marine deposits found at varying 

 elevations up to 600 feet in Norway, where they are usually described 

 as "raised beaches," he says, 



" A mean rate of continuous vertical elevation of two and a half feet in a 

 century would, he considered, be a high average; yet even if this be assumed, 

 it would require 24,000 years for these parts of the sea-coast of Norway to 

 attain that elevation; these or cotemporaneous deposits contain shells, 

 different, indeed, from those of the brackish waier character peculiar to the 

 Baltic, but such as now lie in the Northern Ocean." 



In the Bulletins de la Societe des Sciences., t. vi. (Lausanne, 1 860), 

 there is a good account of the researches of Danish naturalists and 

 antiquaries by an able $wiss geologist, M. A. Marlot. Apparently 

 with this before him, Sir Charles Lyell, in his "Treatise on the 

 Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man," writes (pp. 8, 9) : 



