Sir S. S. Soworth — Surface Geology of N. Europe. 197 



this, the facts presented by the general contour and face of the 

 country seem to me to inevitably point the same lesson. Whether 

 we examine the string of islands which fringe so much of the coast 

 of Scandinavia, and which project from the surrounding water like 

 so many gigantic whales' or porpoises' or turtles' backs ; or whether 

 we examine the thousand islands of the Malar Sea or the Aland 

 Archipelago, with the same contours, or the mammillated surfaces 

 which the gneissic and granitic rocks of the interior districts of 

 Sweden and Finland bear, they seem to me to present a complete 

 parallel to the contour of the islands of the Arctic archipelago north 

 of America, and of the islands off the coast of Greenland, where the 

 lines of drift wood and the stranded whales far above high-water 

 most conclusively point to the whole land having recently risen 

 from the sea. In these latter cases, the Arctic navigators who 

 have seen the phenomena, and the geologists who have described 

 their voyages, have agreed that the North American archipelago and 

 the islands ofi" Greenland have had their contours smoothed and 

 rounded by that most effective of denuding agencies, a shallow ocean 

 loaded with gravel and other debris, and not by an ice-sheet, which 

 does not in fact exist there. Nor, to take another illustration, can 

 we separate in any way, it seems to me, at TroUhattan and elsewhere 

 the polishing and smoothing of the interior and of the lips of the 

 Giants' Cauldrons, which are confessedly the result of the aqueous 

 action just named, from the polishing of the inclined rock-surfaces on 

 which they occur. There is absolute continuity between them. They 

 all seem to me to concur with the upraised shell-beds, the great 

 masses of false- bedded and stratified sands on the wide upland plains 

 of Dalecarlia, and the other evidences which have been collected by 

 the Swedish geologists, and to which I have referred in a previous 

 paper, to show, not that the country has been swathed in ice, but that 

 it has recently been the bed of a shallow and tempestuous sea. This 

 conclusion is of the highest importance. It is not, of course, new. 

 Without going back to the primitive geologists of the early part of 

 the last century, who wrote before the incubation of the Glacial 

 monster, it struck some of the very earliest critics of that theory, 

 who had examined the problem very thoroughly on the ground itself. 



Bohtlingk, an experienced observer and a great traveller in 

 Lapmark and Finmark, to whom we owe the conclusive evidence 

 against polar ice-caps, says : " In Scandinavia, Finland, Lapland, 

 and the surrounding countries we find, to the height of 800 feet, the 

 most unquestionable marks of the constant retreat of the sea 

 occasioned by a continued rise of the land. In consequence of 

 this circumstance Scandinavia, during the first half of the alluvial 

 period, was still an island, and the tongues of land of Eussian 

 Lapland, Finland, Esthonia, the government of Olonetz, as well 

 as those parts of the government of Archangel situated to the east 

 of the White Sea, were covered by the sea," etc. (Ed. Journ., 

 vol. xxxi, 1841, pp. 354, 355.) 



Eobert, the very able geologist of the Eecherche Expedition, 

 writing as far back as 1843, says : " La mer me semblait polir, 



