356 Sir H. H. Koworih — The Surface Contour of 



summits, are continually being upheaved towards the lower snow 

 limit, and are gradually withering away in the cooler atmosphere ; 

 wide belts of forest are composed of nothing but dead trees, althongh 

 some of them have stood for centuries.^ ("The Earth," p. 623.) 

 Although this movement of the Norwegian land is widely recognized, 

 it does not seem to have occurred to the champions of the Glacial 

 theory that it has been going on for a long time ; and so far 

 as every geological piece of evidence goes, it extends back to the 

 so-called Glacial period. There is evidence that this rise has 

 taken place to the extent of 600 feet in certain parts of Norway. 

 If this be so, then it follows that Scandinavia is much higher at 

 present than it was at the period in question ; and if so, it as 

 necessarily follows that, cceteris paribus, its climate is now more 

 severe than it was at the period in question, for the general 

 climatic conditions of a country are measured, otber things being 

 equal, by the amount of its elevatiori above the sea-level. 



This is an elementar}'^ inference which seems to have escaped the 

 champion of the Glacial theory, who, visiting Western Norway for 

 the first time, or many times, and sailing or steaming in and out of 

 its fjords, is struck, as every visitor is struck, by the smoothed and 

 polished walls of I'ock he sees, by the rounded and mammillated 

 appearance of the low islands he passes, and is disposed to break 

 out into magnificent rhetoric on the subject. The facts are plain 

 enough, their explanation is not so plain. To the Glacialist freshly 

 arrived from England, or perhaps Scotland, full of icy enthusiasm, 

 there could be no plainer proof of ice-action on a gigantic scale 

 than these polished and smoothed walls and rounded bosses of 

 crystalline rocks. 



To the sceptic and the Philistine, the natural promptings of a 

 heretical mind are to try and discover some other area where the 

 same conditions occur, and where the story is more plainly written, 

 and he naturally turns to Greenland, another rising land, where 

 the polishing and rounding are of exactly the same kind ; but, 

 inasmuch as the movement of the land is more rapid, the story is 

 clearer. In Greenland and in the archipelago of islands north 

 of America, we have, as I say, precisely the same phenomenon to 

 explain, but there it has been explained, by those who follow 

 inductive methods, not as the consequence of an Ice Age, but as the 

 result of recent submarine submergence and the continued beating 

 and wearing and washing of the rocky surfaces of a rising land, 

 assisted possibly in part by shore-ice and the movement of ice 

 hummocks and gravel, etc. These are causes which would 

 certainly produce the efi'ects presented by Western Norway, and 

 which have been attributed to a hypothetical ice-sheet. This is 

 not all ; these are the results which must inevitably have followed 

 from the considerable submergence of the Scandinavian peninsula, 

 which is not hypothetical at all, but which is one of the best 

 established conclusions in geology. 



This being so, I claim that the attribution of this polishing and 

 1 Keilhau, Bull. Soc. Geol. France, 1st ser., vol. vii. 



