410 H. W. MoncMon — Marine and Suhaerial Erosion. 



find that he is even more subaerial — if I may use such an expression — 

 than myself. The best known of the valleys at the head of the 

 Hardanger Fjord is that leading up to the celebrated waterfall, the 

 Voringfoss. At the top of the fall is the Fosli Hotel, and if we 

 mount up to it we find ourselves upon a wide stretch of moorland 

 with rounded hills and wide open valley, through which flows the 

 River Bjoreia. Whatever may have been the origin of this surface 

 it has been clearly modified by ice-action, for all the rock surfaces 

 are smoothed and rounded and erratic blocks abound. I noticed 

 one boulder of coarse granite, 6 feet high, on the moor, and there 

 are many others of considerable size. How long a time may have 

 elapsed since these boulders were brought to this spot I cannot say, 

 but the perpetual snow probably covered the ground in quite recent 

 times, for the Hardanger Jokl is only some 8 miles away to the 

 north-west, and I believe only about 2,300 feet above Fosli, the 

 level of which is about 2,200 feet. There is a good deal of peat on 

 the moor, and it looked thick in places, but I could find no other 

 superficial deposit. Though there is a general rounding of the 

 outlines of mountain and valley here, I could see nothing which 

 suggested a platform of marine denudation like the Norwegian 

 coast plain. There seemed no point of which one could say, " Here 

 the mountain rises abruptly from the plain," as one so often can in 

 the case of the coast plain. It is true the notch of the old margin 

 might have become full of talus, but with the exception of the 

 slopes of one mountain, Grytefjeld, there seemed very little talus. 

 On the whole it seemed to me that these valleys were the result 

 of subaerial denudation. In this I find Dr. Reusch concurs, and 

 he classes this moorland as belonging to what he names the Palgeic 

 surface of Norway. So far as Norway is concerned he is disposed 

 to define this surface as the surface which existed with its principal 

 features before the Quaternary Period, and thus the surface of 

 Tertiary or even older times. 



If I am right in thinking that the gravel of Chobham Ridges, in 

 Surrey, is a river gravel of the earliest Glacial or even of Pliocene 

 date (Q.J.G-.S., vol. liv, p. 193), then the surface upon which it lies 

 is a bit of the Palseio surface of England, the bottom of a Palaeic 

 valley in fact. In Norway, where the rocks ai'e hard, we have the 

 Palseic hills and valley, with its river still flowing through it, the 

 whole, no doubt, much modified by ice-action. In Surrey, though 

 there was no glacier so far as we know, the floods, etc., of the 

 Ice Age have almost removed the old surface, leaving only the 

 bottom of the valley where it was protected by river gravel. 



The old land surface of Hardanger stands now some 2,000 and 

 more feet above the sea, and in it a series of narrow and deep valleys 

 have been cut out, and into these valleys the rivers flow to the fjord. 

 1'hus the Bjoreia, after flowing in the broad open valley of the old 

 surface, suddenly falls 500 feet into the head of one of these deep 

 valleys (Maabodal), the fall being the Voringfoss. To the north the 

 next stream of any size falls over the steep side of the Simodal as 

 the Skykjedals fall, and the next into the head of the same dale 



