Oscillations of Land in Scandinavia. 211 



Like observations have been made on the coast of Norway, where 

 the deep fjords continue as submarine valleys beyond the present 

 coast to a great depth. For these to have been carved out by the 

 rivers of a past age, the land must of course have lain much higher 

 than now. The so-called ' Norwegian Channel,' if, as is probable, 

 it represents an ancient river-bed, proves the same thing. 



The Scandinavian Pre-Glacial elevation, however, was not confined 

 to the coast of Scandinavia, but evidently affected a large part of the 

 bottom of the present North Atlantic, both westwards to the east ' 

 coast of Greenland and southwards to the south part of England. 

 So far as Great Britain is concerned this elevation is undeniable. 

 The mere existence in this country of a Pre-Glacial mammalian fauna, 

 obviously exterminated by the Ice Age - and partly reminiscent of 

 more southern regions (elephants of various species, mammoth, 

 mastodon, lion, hyseua, etc.), is enough to presuppose a land-con- 

 nection between the continent and England and Ireland, so that the 

 animals could cross to these islands.^ But these mammals did not 

 merely loander across the English Channel and the southern parts 

 of the North Sea ; they also inhabited the districts now sunk beneath 

 the waters, as may be inferred from the "almost incredible" 

 "quantity of teeth and bones belonging to the mammoth, woolly 

 rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, and spotted hyaena, and other animals, 

 dredged up by the fishermen in the German Ocean " (op. cit., p. 365). 

 That the animals lived here at no distant date follows from the fact 

 that their bones are found on the very surface of the sea-floor, as 

 well as from the mixture of remains of Pre-Glacial animals with 

 those of the reindeer, as to whose contemporaneity with the Ice Age 

 there can be no doubt. Finds of this boreal species on the floor 

 of the North Sea show further that the elevation still existed when 

 the Glacial Period was setting in. 



Furthermore, submarine peat-bogs along the coast of England, 

 as well as the discovery of the fresh- water bivalve, Unio pictorum, 

 and shore shells at a greater depth than 200 feet in the English 

 Channel (op. cit., p. 364), bear clear witness to an elevation of the 

 land in Quaternary times. 



But the depth of the English Channel and of the southern part 

 of the North Sea is not very great — at the southern end of the 

 Dogger Bank not more than 13 - 16 metres — and a raising of the 

 sea-bottom fx-ora 30 to 50 metres would be enough to bring a large 



' ' Vristra ' (west) iu original ; correction by the author. 



- H. H. Howorth, " Did the Mammoth live before, during, or after the Deposition 

 of the Drift?" : Geol. Mag., 1892, Dec. Ill, Vol. IX, pp. 250 and 395. 



In England the so-called intcrglacial occurrences of the larger mammals seem to 

 rest only on mistakes or on the estimation of secondary occurrences as primary. Of 

 course they disappear at the same time as the so-called ' interglacial ' deposits cease 

 k) be interpreted as intcrglacial, and this is already the case with the majority. 

 Thus the ' middle sand,' formerly the most important of the interglacial formations, 

 is now very generally regarded as glacial. And, so far as I could discover from 

 conversation with English geologists, the idea of a true * interglacial ' period is now 

 almost abandoned by them. 



^ W. Boyd Dawkins : " Cave Hunting, etc. " ; London, 1S71. Si t^ p. oC2. 



