1002 RETORT—1885. 
Scandinavia is an event of very recent date indeed; it is not only an accident, but 
an uncompleted accident! The Scottish Highlands, with the Hebrides and Donegal 
on the one hand, with Orkney and Shetland on the other, must be regarded—to 
use a technical phrase—as mere ‘ outliers’ of the Scandinavian Peninsula. 
We must acknowledge, at the outset, that the study of the geological history of 
this Scandinavian peninsula and its outliers is a task bristling with difficulties. The 
problems presented to us in our Scottish Highlands are vast, complicated, and at 
times seemingly insoluble. But they are precisely the same problems that con- 
front our brother geologists in Scandinavia. And if our tasks, our doubts, our 
perplexities are the same, we equally share in the advantages and triumphs of 
discovery. 
The geologists of Scandinavia—and right worthy sons of Thor they are—have 
the advantage of possessing a territory almost limitless in its vastness, and seémingly 
infinite in its variety. But the very extent of their splendid country, with its 
sparse population and restricted means of communication, increases the difficulties 
of their task. ‘ The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few!’ With 
our smaller area, if we cannot expect so much variety, we may hope to gain some- 
thing from the number of our students and the greater accessibility of our fields of 
labour. 
Nor would I undervalue, in this connection, the importance of the union of this 
country with England. I allude, of course, not to events of yesterday, like the 
Accession of James VI. to the English throne and the Parliamentary Act of 
Union, but to operations that preceded these by many millions of years! It is no 
small advantage that a country like Scotland, in which the rock-formations are 
found hopelessly crushed and crumpled together, or broken into a thousand ill- 
fitting fragments that seem to defy all attempts to reduce them to order, should 
be united to one like England, where, by comparison, all is orderly and simple, 
the strata lying in regular sequence like well-arranged volumes in a library, and 
only await the touch of the geologist’s hammer to display the wealth of their 
fossil contents. 
The great Scandinavian massif, with its outlying fragments, constitutes the 
“ basal-wreck ’—to employ Darwin’s expressive term—of a great Alpine chain. On 
other occasions I have endeayoured to show how much our study of the nature and 
products of volcanic action is facilitated by the existence of similar ‘ basal-wrecks’ 
of volcanic mountains, like those which exist in your beautiful Western Isles. In 
the same way, I believe we may learn more by the study of this dissected moun- 
tain-chain, concerning the operations by which these grand features of our globe 
have originated, than by the most prolonged examination of the superficial characters 
of the Alps or the Himalayas. 
Here the scalpel of denudation has laid bare the innermost recesses of the 
mountain-masses, and what we can only guess at in the Alps and the Himalayas, 
here stands in our own Highlands clearly revealed to view. 
It is a well-ascertained fact that all the existing lofty mountain-chains have been 
formed at a very recent geological period. The reason of this it is not difficult to 
divine. In the higher regions of the atmosphere, the forces of denudation work so 
rapidly that within a very short period—geologically speaking—the vastest moun- 
tain-chain is razed to its very foundations— 
They melt like mists, the solid lands, 
Like clouds they shape themselves, and go ! 
It is not surprising then to find Powell and Gilbert, fresh from the study of the 
svand mountain-masses of the American Continent, giving expression to these 
thoughts in the following words: ‘ All large mountains are young mountains, and, 
from the point of view of the uniformitarian, it is equally evident that all large 
mountains must be growing mountains ; for if the process of growth is continuous, 
and if a high mountain melts with exceptional rapidity before the play of the ele- 
ments, it is illogical to suppose that the uprising of any mountain, which to-day is 
lofty, has to-day ceased.’ 
The Scandinavian Alps were a living and a growing mountain-chain in the far- 
