350 Sir H. H. Hoicorth—The Baltic — The Anci/lus Sea. 



with vegetable debris of diflferent kinds, as for example branches of 

 Equisetum limosum mixed with fragments of conifers and leaves of 

 the oak, willow, and poplar, needles and cones of Pinus 

 syhestris, cones, branches, and bark of the fir (Abies) and the 

 poplar, remains of a Sparganium with leaves of grass, of Ledium 

 paliistre, etc. Erdmann argues that the Equisetum lived at the 

 margin of the water, but that the other debris were transported by 

 running water (" Expose des formations," etc., pp. 95 and 96). 



Tbese facts seem to me to point to some interesting results. It is 

 probable that the shells are not all in situ on the as. They are frag- 

 mentary and transported. Nor is it quite easy to see how they could 

 well have lived on the two slopes of the as, which rises like a rampart 

 from the adjoining low country, and in no way forms, or could ever 

 have formed, a boundary to the sea. The shells in question are 

 distinctly shore shells, and could hardly again, have lived both on the 

 top of the as and also at the bottom of the valley cutting through it, 

 where they are also found, at the same time, and the question may 

 well be raised whether these upper beds can be exjjlained by any 

 other process than a cataclysm, and whether, as in the case of the 

 Jara wall, they were not laid down in a violent way at the time 

 when the bridge was broken down separating the outer sea from the 

 great Ancylus lake, when a great inrush of water must have taken 

 place. This seems to be the only way of accounting for the facts, 

 which will also account for the finding of many very large erratics 

 on the crests of some of the shell-bearing asar, which must have 

 needed some gigantic force to move them. 



It seems quite preposterous in this case to appeal to ice-portage, for 

 the climate of the country during all the Litorina time was, as we shall 

 see in a later paper, as mild or even milder than it is now. Apart 

 from this there are not, and never could have been, icebergs in the 

 Baltic, certainly not at a time when the present flora occupied the 

 land. The only ice available would be shore ice, but shore ice is only 

 found and only acts on sea-beaches. It cannot reach up to 150 feet 

 above the water-level, which is the height of this as. If the as 

 was already there when the shells and also the boulders were 

 deposited, there can be no question of its having been there as 

 a beach barrier. The fact of the shells occurring on both slopes 

 forbids such a notion, as does the whole arrangement of the beds in 

 the huge mound. Nowhere that we know of are beach ramparts 

 being formed in the fashion of these asar. Anyone who will visit 

 them and tramp over them for miles, as I have done, and sit upon 

 and contemplate the size of the erratics on their back, and the 

 conditions and surroundings, physical and biological, in which they 

 occur, and who still pleads for ice as the transporter of the stones which 

 lie in and on their current-bedded sands and gravels with such shells 

 as Mytibis and Cardium, seems to me to have abandoned science for 

 romance and metaphysics, and this may even be the case with some 

 prominent and very confident advocates of what is called moderate 

 glacialism. 



I pi'opose to return to the question in another paper. Meanwhile 



