Sir IT. H. Hoicorth — Dislocation of the Chalk. 305 



than of elevation, and that the effects so remarkable in Moen were 

 the result of the sinking in of the bed of the surrounding sea to the 

 depth of 500 to 600 feet ; this affected the whole island, together 

 with Denmark, which afterwards rose again covered with its mantle 

 of sand and clay and boulders. Then it was that the scarped cliffs 

 of Moen were formed, and became the subject-matter of attack 

 by the waves of the Baltic, reinforced by the waters of the Arctic 

 Ocean, coming by way of the then open Bothnian Channel. He 

 considei's that this sinking probably affected the whole of the 

 North and East European districts where the drift phenomena 

 occur, and also extended to the mainland of Denmark and of 

 Scandinavia, and he considers the Swedish Asar and the Danish 

 sand riicken as due to the same cause. The depth to which lie 

 carries this sinking is apparently based on the height ahove the sea- 

 level at which marine shells have occurred in Scandinavia and 

 England. He attributes the dislocations in the strata of Moen to 

 about the time of the so-called Glacial age, and adds the notable 

 words — " Ich glaube dieses Ereigniss als eine bequeme Grenze 

 der Tertiiiren und Quaternaren Periode fur Nord Europa ansehen 

 zu konnen obschon eine scharfe Scheidung der beiderseitigen 

 Bildungen nur ausnahmsweise moglich ist." (Op. cit. See also 

 Pnggaard, " Sur la geologie de l'ile de Moen " : Bull. Soc. Geol. 

 France, 2nd ser., viii, p. 532, etc.) 



Lyell, the great champion of Uniformity and a very keen critic 

 of the work of others, adopts and incorporates the arguments and 

 results of Pnggaard in his " Antiquity of Man." 



We must now pass on a few years. In his memoir published 

 in 1874 on the dislocations in Moen and Rugen, F. Johnstrup 

 endeavoured to account for them by appealing to ice. 



Against this view more than one famous German geologist protested. 

 Von Koenen, in examining the broken and dislocated chalk of the 

 Danish islands, contests the possibility of ice having anything to 

 do with it ; he traverses Johnstrup's case in detail, and compares the 

 phenomena discussed by him with the very similar phenomena he has 

 himself described in Hessen and on the Weser, and notably in the 

 districts of Kreiensen, Gottingen, Marburg, Hersfeld, Geisa, and 

 Vacha, where no traces of northern erratics or ice-work occur, 

 and where they cannot, therefore, be attributed to ice. He 

 especially quotes the underpinning of the great chalk masses by 

 boulder-clay and sand, which he compares with the reversed strata 

 at Hiiggel, near Osnabruck, where the Middle and Upper Lias 

 are thrust in below the beds of Zechstein. He compares the 

 hollows and basins of various shapes occurring in Pugen with 

 the similar hollows in Central Germany, which he had already 

 shown to be due to the sinking of the ground ; he points out 

 that the faults which occur in this district are of Pleistocene age, 

 and argues that the general dislocations were coincident with 

 a sinking of the bed of the Baltic. (See A. von Koenen, "Ueber post- 

 glaciale Dislokationen " : Jahrbuch der Konigl. Preuss. geologischen 

 Landesanstalt und Bergakademie, 1886, pp. 1-19.) 



DECADE IV. VOL. III. NO. VII. 20 



