348 Sir H. H. Howorth — The Baltic — The Ancylus Sea. 



the Litorina time. The latter series of shells follows abruptly upon 

 the former, and this abruptness seems to me to inevitably point to 

 an abrupt breach in the conditions. 



Secondly, the condition of the submerged peat bogs and of 

 shallow-water beach gravels in deep water are quite inconsistent 

 with a gradual denudation by which the coastline was eaten back. 

 Such a process of gradual eating back would have entirely destroyed 

 the peat bogs and disintegrated and dispersed the submarine sunken 

 beach pebbles ; the pounding and grinding of the shingle on exposed 

 shores would not leave great stretches of peat with enclosed trunks 

 of trees with masses of dead leaves, twigs, etc., lying in great slabs. 

 The existence of these submerged peat-beds occurring in this 

 fashion and of their contents unweathered and unworn, points to 

 their having subsided rapidly or suddenly, so that they could not be 

 acted upon by the tide, but remained safe and unweathered at depths 

 where the sea does not erode. 



Thirdly, if the opening of the land-bridge which once limited the 

 fresh-water Ancylus lake had been gradual, we should have had 

 a gradual addition of salinity to the Baltic waters until it reached 

 a certain normal amount, when it would have become more or less 

 stationary and not a culmination of the salinity at the inception of 

 the Litorina stage and the gradual sweetening of its waters since. 

 The high grade of salinity at the beginning of the Litorina time 

 and its gradual declension since, is hardly explainable except as the 

 result of a sudden inpouring of salt water due to a sudden or very 

 rapid breakdown of the land -bridge. 



Again, there is direct evidence that since the so-called Neolithic 

 age there have been some cataclysmic phenomena which have caused 

 considerable movements of water in this part of the Baltic. To one 

 of these inundations some inquirers have given the name of the 

 Cimbrian flood, and they have associated it with the well-known 

 passage in Ammianus Marcellinus in which he says, " The Druids 

 aflSrm that the inhabitants poured in from the islands on the coast 

 and from the districts beyond the Ehine, having been driven from 

 their former abodes by frequent wars, and sometimes by inroads of 

 the tempestuous sea " (op. cit., xv, ch. 9). 



More directly geological evidence of a similar fact is forthcoming. 

 Thus, Forchhammer says that on the islands west of Sleswig traces of 

 an inundation may be found to the great height of about 60 feet above 

 the present high-water mark, which happened while the islands 

 were inhabited by man, because we find tumuli partially destroyed 

 by the inundation. The effect and height of this flood may easily 

 be traced by a bed of pebbles, partly rounded, partly angular, con- 

 taining now and then fragments of bricks, and easily distinguished 

 from a beach by its occurrence in one single bed hardly a foot thick, 

 undulating with the surface, and in one place found only a few feet 

 above high-water mark, while at others it is about 50 feet above it. 

 He considers it as the washing away of the finer materials, or the 

 sand and sandy clay (Forchhammer, Geol. Trans., ser. ii, vi, 160). 



The existence of the great as on the seaboard of Scania called the 



