2 MR. LYELL ON THE PROOFS OF A GRADUAL RISING OF 



clared that the supposed change of relative level of sea and land in Sweden, which 

 appeared to him to be sufficiently ascertained, might be ascribed to the movement 

 of the land rather than of the waters. He observed, " that in order to depress or 

 elevate the absolute level of the sea, by a given quantity, in any one place, we must 

 depress or elevate it by the same quantity over the whole surface of the earth ; 

 whereas no such necessity exists with respect to the elevation or depression of the 

 land*." The hypothesis of the rising of the land, he adds, "agrees well with the 

 Huttonian theory, which holds that our continents are subject to be acted upon by 

 the expansive forces of the mineral regions ; that by these forces they have been 

 actually raised up, and are sustained by them in their present situation -f^." 



In the year 1807 Von Buch, after returning from a tour in Scandinavia, announced 

 his conviction " that the whole country from Frederick shall in Sweden to Abo in 

 Finland, and perhaps as far as St. Petersburgh, was slowly and insensibly rising ;" a 

 conclusion to which he appears to have been led principally by information obtained 

 from the inhabitants, and in part by the occurrence of marine shells, of recent species, 

 which he had found at several points on the coast of Norw^ay above the level of the sea. 



At several periods since this discussion began respecting the decline of the level of 

 the Baltic Sea and German Ocean, marks have been cut on the rocks of exposed cliffs, 

 both of islands and the main land, so as to indicate the then existing height of the 

 waters, the year in which the marks were made being at the same time recorded. 

 All these marks were examined in 1820-21 by the officers of the pilotage establish- 

 ment of Sweden, and a report made by them to the Royal Academy at Stockholm, 

 in which they declared, as the result of their measurement, that along the whole coast 

 of the northern part of the Gulf of Bothnia the water is lower with respect to the land 

 than formerly ; but that the amount of variation, or change of level, has not been 

 uniform. At the same time an account was given in, and published by the Academy, 

 of new marks which were made in the same years, 1820-21, to record the level of 

 the sea observed at the time of the survey. 



Notwithstanding the numerous proofs recorded of the change of level, and the 

 high authorities who had declared in its favour, I continued, in common with many 

 others, to entertain some doubts respecting the reality of the phenomenon, partly 

 because I suspected that it might be explained by reference to more ordinary causes, 

 such as some of those above mentioned, and partly because it appeared to me im- 

 probable that such great effects of subterranean expansion should take place in 

 countries which, like Sweden and Norway, have been remarkably free within the 

 times of history from violent earthquakes. The slow, constant, and insensible ele- 

 vation of a large tract of land, is a process so different from the sudden rising or 

 falling known to have accompanied, in certain regions, the intermittent action of 

 earthquakes and volcanos, that the fact appeared to require more than an ordinary 

 weight of evidence for its confirmation. I am willing, however, to confess, after 



* § 393. I § 398. 



