Sir H. S. Sou'orth — The Scandinavian Ice-sheet. 5 



supposed to have carried erratics to the Carpathians on the one 

 hand and to Britain on the other. They would all have been swept 

 away or their stratification destroyed. So would the vast and 

 mysterious asar, the kames, etc., of whose aqueous origin it seems 

 impossible to doubt. 



Hence the Swedish geologists have, without exception, put their 

 great submersion after their Glacial Period, just as their submergence 

 is put by the American geologists after theirs. 



Let us now see what follows from this. In the first place, as 

 I argued in a previous paper, following in the wake of Pettersen, the 

 smoothed and polished faces of rock and the huramocky islands on the 

 coasts of Scandinavia, which have been so very generally accepted 

 as presenting the most palpable traces of ice action, are much more 

 likely to have been the result of the wearing of the tide armed with 

 gravel, or stones, or shore ice. Pettersen seems to me to have 

 clearly shown that this was the case on the Norwegian coast, and 

 I believe it to have been equally so on the Lofoden Islands. We 

 cannot suppose that these rocky faces and surfaces should have been 

 exposed, as they must have been, to submarine action and erosion for 

 a long time (as is evidenced by the mollusca in the raised beaches) 

 without having been smoothed and mammillated as they are. The 

 string of islands which fringe the Norwegian coast, the similar 

 islands in the Christiania Fiord, the Malar, and the Aland archipelago, 

 all seem to me to have one aspect, the same as the archipelago of 

 islands north of America, which have recently emerged from the 

 sea, and their aspect seems due to the like cause ; and I cannot 

 separate the inland smoothed rocks of Sweden situated in a region 

 ■which has been unmistakably submerged from the same category. 



If this be so, a fortiori must we attribute the striations and 

 scratchings upon these same smoothed rocks to the handiwork of 

 some force acting during or since the submergence. It is incon- 

 ceivable that these scratches and stride should have survived the 

 wear and tear of a submergence in these tempestuous latitudes for 

 a long period, and the grating and rubbing of shingle and gravel 

 and shore ice. I cannot, in fact, see how the scratches and strige on 

 the walls of the fiords in Norway, which have been so frequently 

 quoted as proofs of the handiwork of an ice-sheet, can have been the 

 work of any ice-sheet that was active before the great submergence ; 

 and, as we have seen, it is only before the submergence that we 

 have any warrant for believing in such an ice-sheet at all. It is not 

 only that the sea must have worn away all such minute marks, but 

 "we actually have evidence that it cut back the rocks, forming a series 

 of recessed terraces called strandlinier. How could glacial striae 

 survive a cutting back like this ? 



In regard to the long striae which traverse the Dovrefelds for 

 many miles, and often run athwart their line of drainage, it 

 seems impossible to understand how, if the ice culminated on the 

 fells and moved outwardly in various directions, it could have cut 

 and scored these straight long striae and incisions. These striae, 

 running in straight lines right across the watershed of the country, 



