408 Sir H. H. Howorth — Geological History of the Baltic. 



to be definitely solved, namely, the variation of the barometric 

 pressure, the height of the Atlantic tide, and the potency of the wind. 

 These make it difficult to fix any norm or index by vphich to 

 measure permanent changes of level, and he turns his inquiries from 

 the physical data to archseological evidence as affording a more 

 satisfactory result inasmuch as it enables us to cover a much longer 

 period of observation. 



From the close of the Bronze or beginning of the early Iron Age, 

 we have cairns very near the present beach, and from the later Iron 

 Age we have also other fixed relics along the coast, which are now 

 quite as near the sea-level as it is possible for them to be. From 

 these it must be concluded, says our author, "that the sea-level has 

 not been subjected to any permanent secular change on the 

 Norwegian coast in the last millennium, very likely not in the last 

 two thousand years" (op. cit., p. 110). Some critical examples may 

 be quoted in support of this generalization: Everest, in his travels 

 in Norway, informs us that the Island of Munkolra, an insulated 

 rock in the harbour of Trondhjem, proves that the land there has not 

 altered in level for eight centuries. The island is not larger than 

 a small village. By an official survey the highest point is only 

 23 feet above river high-water mark, and a monastery was founded 

 there by Canute the First in a.d. 1028, and thirty-eight years before 

 that it was used as . a place for execution (Lyell, Principles, ii,. 

 p. 195, 1875). 



In regard to the rate of the rise, Hansen again says : " The 

 present shore-line in Norway is of considerable age. It is impossible 

 to believe that the present clearly defined, strongly developed beach 

 extending from high to low water has been formed under any 

 (however slow) secular shifting of the sea-level. The rocks 

 immediately above show in some places the work of the breakers, 

 which cannot be observed higher up, and the surface-profile in loose 

 material does not answer at all to a regular rise of the land" 

 (ibid., pp. 110-11). It is plain, therefore, that the raised beaches 

 of Norway, as of Sweden and Britain, point to the land having been 

 long quiescent, while they index a period when the earth was 

 subjected to great movements, which nevertheless were contemporary 

 with the present marine fauna in the North Sea. These movements 

 virtually ceased hundreds of years ago. In Norway, as in Sweden, 

 therefore, we have the same kind of evidence that the uplift has not 

 been continuous but spasmodic, which is again revealed by insulated 

 raised beaches separated by stretches void of such testimony. They 

 occur at different levels in different places, but as far as we know 

 synchronous. The culminating point of the raised beaches with 

 shells on the west of Norway is in the Trondhjem Fjord, where they 

 reach to a height of 600 feet. There, as in Sweden, they descend in 

 level both as we travel northward and southward. Yon Buch, in the 

 Breistad Fjord, some distance north of Trondhjem, found marine 

 shells 140 feet above the sea-level {Eeisen, pp. 1-251). M. Eugene 

 Robert describes how, in the Island of Ham between North Cape and 

 Hammerfest, he had found a great alluvial deposit running with 

 a gentle slope to a height of more than lOT? feet, and showing 



