554 Sir H. H. Hoicorth — Geological History of the Baltic. 



and his re-measurement of the different marks justified the con- 

 clusion he came to, namely, that " they ■prove nothing. The daily 

 and weekly alterations in the level of the water caused by changes 

 of the wind, and sometimes, I believe, by winds not felt at the 

 spot where the change of level takes place, are so very con- 

 siderable that anything that may have taken place in 30 years is 

 almost imperceptible in comparison." After quoting some special 

 cases to show the difficulty he says : " From this I infer that 

 until the average level is more clearly ascertained, no inference 

 can be drawn from these marks." After again referring to the 

 possibility of the stones themselves having been raised or moved 

 by shore ice, he quotes a Swedish report by Mr. G. Widell on 

 the marks at Marstrand, who had come to the same conclusion 

 as himself as to the uncertainty of any inferences to be drawn at 

 present from these marks. Mr. Widell was the Eector of the 

 Academy at Marstrand (Q.J.Gr.S., xxiii, 191-196). 



If we turn from the experimental tests to evidence of another 

 kind, there is a very extraordinary concurrence of testimony in 

 favour of the conclusion that the older writers like Celsius, 

 Von Buch, etc., who believed the changes in the Baltic to be still in 

 progress and to have been progressive from early times until now, 

 were mistaken. 



Lyell, whose frank acknowledgment of the facts on the other 

 side is always so notable,^quotes the cases of the castles at Calmar, 

 built in 1030, and of Abo in Finland, whose position near the 

 sea makes it impossible to believe that there can have been much 

 change of level since they were built. He refers again to the 

 records about certain oak-trees at the fishing park of Fiskertorp 

 on the Malar Sea, and declared by the keeper of the Koyal forests 

 to be 400 years old, and yet growing but ten feet above the 

 level of the present tide (Phil. Trans., 1835, p. 13). 



He also quotes a more critical test case, cited by the older 

 Swedish writers : " On the shores of the Gulf of Finland were 

 formerly some pines and oaks growing close to the water's edge; 

 these were cut down, and by counting the concentric rings of 

 annual growth, as seen in a transverse section of the trunk, it 

 was demonstrated that some of them had stood there for nearly 

 400 years. Now," says Lyell, "according to the Celsian hypothesis 

 the sea had sunk about 15 feet during that period, in which case 

 the germination and early growth of these trees must have been 

 for many seasons below the level of the water " (Lyell's 

 "Principles," 12th ed., ii, 183). The argument, he adds, founded 

 on the position of the trees, is, as Professors Loven and Erdmann 

 have lately remarked, unanswerable so far as it relates to a part 

 at least of the Finnish coast (id.). 



I may quote another piece of similar evidence which seems to me 

 also very conclusive. On November 12th, 1903, Mr. W. Wermersten 

 read a paper before the Students' Association at Upsala on an old 

 deposit of the Stone Age in the south of the Island of Gotland. 

 Parts of human skeletons as well as bones of dog, pig, and seal were 



