400 Sir H. H. Hoivorth — The Surface Contour of 



Scandinavian peninsula. This is confirmed by the general contour 

 of the country, which is apparently moulded on the principle of 

 a succession of great hollows and elevations, arranged in roughly 

 parallel lines ; one deep hollow being the trough running along 

 the western coast of Norway, another trough being the Gulf of 

 Bothnia and the Baltic, while the intervening peninsula forms 

 a gigantic down ; and it may well be that this contour was first 

 given to the country comparatively recently, and in fact con- 

 temporaneously with the foldings of the bed of the North Sea 

 and the dislocations of the Chalk in Norfolk and in Denmark, and 

 that when the so-called Drift was deposited not only was the 

 Dovrefeld not the watershed of the peninsula, but the whole 

 country was comparatively flat and plain. If the contortions of 

 the strata were like those further west, and like those forming the 

 Ural Mountains, which we long ago argued belonged to the same era 

 of upheaval, it is also probable that as in those cases they were the 

 results, not of slow movements, but of cataclysmic ones leading to 

 the breakage and disintegration of the crystalline rocks on a great 

 scale. It is only in this way we can account in fact for the 

 prodigious mass of angular or subangular boulders and rock frag- 

 ments of Scandinavian and Finnish primitive rocks, which not only 

 strew those countries but are also found over Central Russia and 

 Germany. Their number and size seem absolutely inconsistent 

 with their having been the result of ordinarj'^ diurnal denudation by 

 frost and rain acting upon exposed peaks, and the country is much 

 too low to admit of this deduction being justifiably imported as 

 a hypothesis from the entirely different conditions in the Alps. 

 It points very forcibly to some tremendous strain which smashed 

 and broke up the beds just as we have seen the Chalk beds of 

 Eastern England and of Denmark were disintegrated and broken. 

 Apart from this, have we any direct evidence of these more or 

 less rapid and gigantic movements and dislocations in Scandinavia? 

 In the high Norwegian mountains the evidence is, of course, not 

 easy to find, since we have no chronometer by which to test 

 when the rupture and dislocation of the crystalline masses of 

 the Dovrefeld took place. We do not know directly when the 

 great mass was upheaved, necessarily leading to the creation 

 of the transverse fissures we call fjords, and it would in fact appear 

 from the paucity of Norwegian boulders in the northern Drift, 

 compared with Swedish and Finnish ones, that the Norwegian beds 

 largely escaped the breakage. When we get further east, however, 

 into Sweden we do have such evidence. 



In this behalf I would quote some interesting observations of 

 Sefstrom and Murchison, in Dalecarlia, which have been overlooked 

 and forgotten. The former tells us that M. H. Wegelin had told 

 him that the mountains bounding Norway, Herjedalen and Dalecarlia, 

 did not consist of any fixed continuous strata, but of a mass of 

 large and small pieces of rock which have sharp edges, and therefore 

 have never been rolled, that they were all rent asunder or shattered 

 to pieces on the spot; that none of the blocks are furrowed; and 



