US HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



History of Nonvay^ 1753. In the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, Werner's scholar, Jens Esmarch, conducted mineral- 

 ogical investigations in Norway. J. L> Hausmann travelled 

 through Scandinavia in 1806 and 1807. His chief aim was to 

 investigate the mining districts of Sweden and Southern Nor- 

 way, and his account of the journey, which was published 

 several years later, contains a large number of valuable observa- 

 tions on the minerals and ores of these districts. It also 

 embraces detailed descriptions of the Cambrian rocks near 

 Andrarum, the famous section at Kinnekulle, and other features 

 of geological interest. Hausmann was the first scientific 

 observer who noted the position of the granite above the 

 "transitional" limestone formation in the neighbourhood of 

 Christiania, and the first who described the zircon syenite of 

 the Langensund (cf. p. 86). 



But Leopold von Buch's Journey to Norway and Lapland 

 (Berlin, 1810) was the work which first gave European geolo- 

 gists an insight into the general geological structure of Norway. 

 The novelty of many of the districts traversed, and the author's 

 genius for the narration of scientific observations, combined to 

 secure immediate popularity for this work. 



On the journey to Scandinavia, Leopold" von Buch passed 

 through Mecklenburg, Hamburg, Holstein, and Copenhagen. 

 He gave full notes about the erratic blocks, and the white 

 chalk of Moen and Stevensklint. The journey to Christiania 

 was carried out by land, the route leading across the Swedish 

 seaboard and the coast of the Christiania Fjord. Von Buch 

 confirmed Hausmann's observation that not granite but gneiss 

 was the predominating rock in this district. He was also 

 greatly struck by the relations between the transitional rock- 

 formations and the granite-grained rocks. He described the 

 various kinds of rock, and showed that the porphyry penetrated 

 the " transitional " formations as dykes and veins, and that be- 

 tween Drammen and Christiania a large mass of granite rested 

 upon fossiliferous "transitional limestone." This occurrence 

 was at once admitted by Buch to be incontestable evidence 

 that granite was not, as Werner had taught, in all cases part of 

 the oldest rock-formation, although he still clung to the idea of 

 the aqueous origin of the porphyritic and granitic series. In 

 1808, Leopold von Buch travelled through the northern terri- 

 tories of Norway and Lapland. He took geological observations 

 at the Dovre Feld Mountain in Drontheim, at Lake Mjosen, 



