102 Geological Society of London. 
Evidence of a sinking down of land, whether sudden or gradual, 
is usually more difficult to obtain than the signs of upheaval. _I shall 
therefore mention some facts which have been lately communicated 
to me by Professor Nilsson, from which it appears that Scania, or 
the southernmost part.of Sweden, has been slowly subsiding for sev- 
eral centuries, in the same manner as was lately shown to be the 
case with part of Greenland. In the first place there are no elevated 
beds of recent marine shells in Scania, like those near Stockholm and 
further to the north. Linnzus, with a view of ascertaining whether 
the waters of the Baltic were retiring from the Scanian shore, meas- 
ured in 1749 the distance between the sea and a large stone near 
Trelleborg. Now Mr. Nilsson informs me that this same stone is a 
hundred feet nearer the water’s edge than it was in Linneus’s time, 
or eighty-seven years before. He also states that there is a submer- 
ged peat moss, consisting of land and fresh-water plants, beneath the 
sea at a point to which no peat could have been drifted down by any 
river. But what is still more conclusive, it is found that in sea-port 
towns, all along the coast of Scania, there are streets below the 
high-water level of the Baltic, and in some cases below the level of 
the lowest tide. Thus when the wind is high at Malmé the water 
overflows one of the present streets, and some years ago some ex- 
cavations showed an ancient street in the same place eight feet be- 
~ low, and it was then seen that there had evidently been an artificial 
raising of the ground, doubtless in consequence of that subsidence. 
There is also a street at Trelleborg and another at Skanor a few 
inches below high-water mark, and a street at Ystad is just on a 
level with the sea, at which it could not have been originally built. 
I trust that we shall soon receive more circumstantial details of these 
curious phenomena, which are the more interesting because it has 
been shown that the elevatory movement in Sweden diminishes in 
intensity as we proceed southward from the North Cape to Stock- 
holm, from which it seems probable that after passing the line or axis 
of least movement, where the land is nearly stationary, a movement 
may be continued in an opposite direction, and thus cause the grad- 
ual sinking of Scania. 
- Teannot take leave of this subject without remarling that the 
occurrence in various parts of Ireland, Scotland, and England, of re- 
cent shells in stratified gravel, sand, and loam, confirms the opinion 
which J derived from an examination of part of Sweden, namely, that 
the formations usually called diluvial have not been produced by any 
