360 Sir H. Howorth — Surface Contour of Scandinavia <^ Finland. 



sands whicli he met with in Finland, and which are only consistent 

 with aqueous action. The most experienced and recent authorities in 

 Finland, such as Nordquist and R, Hult, are of one mind about it. 

 The former speaks of an Arctic sea which covered the greater part 

 of Scandinavia, Finland, and Northern Russia (see Zool. Anzeiger, 

 nn. 254-5) ; and the latter, in a recent geological memoir, 

 collects the evidence for the recent submergence of Southern 

 Finland, especially the country round Helsingfors ; while Crednei", 

 whose prejudices are all the other way, is constrained to say : 

 " Indessen, so hestimmt ans Zahlreiclien Anzeichen auf eine fruJier 

 umfassendere Wasserbedechiing Finlands geschlossen tverden muss." 

 (" Relikten seen," part 2, p. 14.) 



I would therefore urge that the recent history of the Scandinavian 

 peninsula and Finland is the rise of the whole country from 

 a condition in which a large portion of it was under the sea, 

 until it became dry land as at present. This view has forced itself on 

 everyone who has examined the country on the spot, and was held 

 as much by Lyell and C. Martins as by Sefstrom and Durocher, by 

 Credner and Erdraann. If so, it follows, it seems to me, that the 

 climate of Scandinavia and its borders, like that of Greenland, 

 instead of having become milder, has become more severe in these 

 later times ; and we can hardly doubt that when Scandinavia 

 formed an archipelago of islands, constituted by those portions of 

 it which are still unworn and un weathered and surrounded largely 

 by water, those islands, instead of having been the nursery-ground 

 of snow-sheets and icebergs or of glaciers much larger than those 

 now existing, had a very different climate indeed, the land having 

 been probably the home of trees, and the sea full of molluscs, etc. 

 I cannot see how and where we are to find room or place 

 between this condition of things and to-day for an Ice Age, with its 

 portentous machinery. If thei'e ever were an Ice Age in Scaudinavia, 

 therefore it was before this submergence, and not after it ; and the 

 majority of the champions of such a period, when the greater part of 

 the country is supjjosed to have been blanketed in ice, put it in fact 

 on the other side of this submergence. They claim further that 

 before the land was covered by the sea it stood at a probably much 

 higher level than it even does now, and was consequently capable 

 of nursing a great ice-sheet. Of direct evidence of this former 

 higher level of the land, I know none whatever. It is a postulate 

 entirely created to meet the exigencies of the ice-men, and is 

 completely arbitrary, and until evidence of it is forthcoming it 

 ought to be erased from our books. 



To Erdmann, the latest Swedish authority on the Ice Age, the 

 beds which especially attest the action of ice in Sweden, and which 

 he styles morainic, are not those formed of rounded pebbles, which 

 he naturally assigns to the action of water, but the so-called angular 

 gravel and the angular erratics. First let me remark that these beds 

 of angular gravel have no resemblance whatever to moraines in their 

 external appearance. They are not arranged in mounds, concentric 

 or otherwise, but are laid down in continuous mantles, quite unlike 



