Scandinavia and Finland. 359 



or its handiwoi^k. They have been described as occurring in various 

 parts of Sweden, and from their position attest the great alterations 

 of contour of the country since they were made. 



Bergmann, in the last century, mentions six as occurring at 

 Kokare Fiarden, in Finland. One of them was still under water of 

 a foot deep, and was only thirty years old when he wrote, and its 

 actual growth had been watched by Nordenskiold ; and he urges that 

 others of a similar kind, out of reach of the present streams, had the 

 same origin. He mentions others in Jemteland, in West Gothland, 

 and in Bohuslan. Sefstrom also describes these giants' cauldrons, 

 or Jiittegrytor as the Swedes call them, and points out that they are 

 made by our present rivers, such as those near Avesta; and tells us 

 that he himself saw some uncommonly beautiful ones some years 

 before, while they were digging the canal on the side of Ostra Dalefven. 

 Near G-agnefs Grada several of these cauldrons were met with, some 

 large enough for a person to stand in. They were situated where 

 a river formerly flowed down a slope. Others are mentioned as 

 existing on the side of a hill near Stockholm between RoslagstuU 

 and Albans, apparently quite out of the route of any now possible 

 river or stream. A famous one, in which several people can sit, 

 exists on the mountain above the present falls of Trollhiiltan, and 

 was therefore made by water when the contour of the country was 

 entirely diiferent to what it is now. 



Let us now turn to another kind of evidence. This was adduced 

 by that very acute observer Durocher, and accepted by Murchison, 

 namely, the composition of the sand which forms such a notable 

 part of the surface beds of Scandinavia. Durocher observed and 

 described large horizontal tracts of sand in which only the quartz- 

 grains remain, the mica and felspar of the original matrix having 

 been in a large measure dissolved and washed away, a condition 

 of things only to be explained by aqueous causes, and quite diiferent 

 to the sands due to the disintegration of granite in situ either by ice or 

 other means. This submergence seems to me to be completely con- 

 firmed again by the shape and contour of the surface of these northern 

 lands : the rounded, whale-backed or mammillated surfaces, polished 

 and smoothed, the rolled and rounded boulders, the polished pebbles 

 in the gravels— all these are precisely paralleled by the phenomena 

 reported by the Arctic navigators as marking the surface of the 

 North American Archipelago, and that part of the northern shores 

 of the continent which we know has only just emerged from the 

 sea, and it seems to me we must attribute them to the same cause. 



That this movement is shared by Finland, is also well known ; 

 and there also we have the same kind of evidence, except that 

 marine shells are very scarce ; but as an old writer says : " It 

 is impossible not to perceive that the top of every rock in situ, 

 every tor, every hill and knoll of granite, or primitive rock, from 

 Carelia to the Gulf of Bothnia, presents a surface as distinctly 

 rounded and water-worn as the boulders or colossal pebbles that 

 lie around their bases." 



Durocher described long ago the wide stretches of rudely stratified 



