196 Sir K. K. Soivorth — Surface Geology of N. Europe. 



been constantly in one direction. If this be true, it follows as 

 certainly as any physical fact follows its efficient cause that, other 

 conditions being the same, the climate of Scandinavia, like that of 

 Greenland, has been continually growing moi'e severe, and is more 

 severe now, than it was when the higher Norwegian raised beaches 

 were deposited. 



The other conditions, however, have, so far as we can judge, not 

 been uniform. One of them, and that a very important one, has in 

 all probability altered, and that is the one which gives Norway and 

 Britain their exceptional climate, and which diverts the isothermal 

 lines of Western Europe from their normal route across Asia and 

 America in places on the same latitude. This is the Gulf Stream. 

 There are very strong reasons (and I have formulated some of them 

 in my " Glacial Nightmare ") for believing that at the close of the 

 Tertiary period the so-called Gut of Florida was blocked by solid 

 land, and in consequence tlie warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico did 

 not then get into the North Atlantic. If the Gulf Stream were non- 

 existent, it is clear that the climate of the two sides of the Atlantic 

 would be more alike than they are now along the same latitudes. 

 That this was so is proved by the more Arctic types of molluscs 

 which then lived on the coasts of Scandinavia and Scotland, and by 

 the evidence of the existence of Alpine and Arctic plants at lower 

 levels and in lower latitudes in Western Europe, as shown by 

 Nathorst and C. Eeid. This conclusion is not only reasonable, but 

 seems incontrovertible. It does not mean that North- Western 

 Europe was then dominated by a Glacial climate and Glacial con- 

 ditions, but only that it was more or less assimilated in regard to its 

 climate to Canada and New England. 



As we have also seen, the evidence is very strong and conclusive, 

 and has convinced almost every Swedish geologist, that not only has 

 the greater part of Scandinavia and Finland risen greatly in altitude 

 in the last geological period, but that this wide area has in a large 

 measure been actually submerged under the sea since Tertiary times, 

 and that its rise after this submergence was the last great fact which 

 affected its surface. 



I have argued that it was this submergence which did so much to 

 polish and mammillate its rock-surfaces, effects which I hold to be 

 the results in a very large measure of the eroding forces of the sea 

 in a tempestuous latitude, and not of the hypothetical ice-sheet of 

 which we have read so much. I will add another argument to those 

 already used. If the terraces on the Norwegian coast really mark, 

 as the Norwegian geologists argue, the differential rate of elevation 

 of the coast, which has caused the cutting back of the cliffs to be 

 more rapid at one time than at another, it is clear that the polished 

 rock faces of Norway cannot be due to anything but the corroding 

 sea, for these faces have been worn back many feet while the coast 

 has been rising, and cannot therefore retain any polish or smoothness 

 they may have acquired in the times preceding the upheaval. If 

 they were polished by ice, the ice must have acted, not before, but 

 after the elevation, which is a reductio ad absurdum. Apart from 



