482 J. If. Wilson — Forms of Valleys and Lake-basins. 



the fiords, and have a very uniform character. Their direction is 

 generally nearly straight on the whole ; they are narrow, however, 

 and the minor cm'ves are sufficient to prevent a view from one end of 

 the valley to the other ; their sides are steep, often precipitous, and 

 terminate at a level, singularly uniform in each district, of about 

 2500 to 3000 feet. At this level the slope changes and becomes 

 much more gradual, forming the soeter (or chalet) level, on which 

 cows and goats pasture in the summer, inhabited by lemming and 

 ryper, and covered by heath and bilberry, birch and willow. From 

 this soeter level rise the gently sloping snow-fields, as of the Folge- 

 fond, or the jDcaks and mountain chains, as of the Horungerne, which 

 are thus totally invisible from the valleys. Even the Horungerne 

 mountains, whose outline is comparable to that of the Bernese Alps 

 for variety and grandeur, and several of whose summits are over 

 8000 feet in height, are completely hidden by the edge of the soeter 

 level from all the valleys and fiords that surround them. Over the 

 edge of this soeter- plain the water falls into the deep valleys some- 

 times in great cascades like the Yoring Fos or Morke Fos, sometimes 

 in Staubbachs too numerous to have received names. 



At the end of each fiord the levels of old sea-beaches are almost 

 always to be seen ; when these are passed there is generally a lake, 

 moraine-dammed, and at its head other terraces. Then the valley 

 narrows, and winds on, slowly rising, sometimes opening out into a 

 few acres which form a small farm, and sometimes flanked by pre- 

 cipices and steep slopes of huge blocks of stone terminating in the 

 river at the bottom. Sometimes masses of rocJies moutonnees form 

 a buttress projecting from one side, or a central mound, or a barrier 

 extending completely across the valley. At the curves of the valleys 

 the glaciation is very evident. 



Now the fact that struck me again and again in walking up these 

 valleys was this : that the disposition of the principal divisional 

 planes of the rocks altered with the windings of the valleys ; so that 

 in general the surface of these planes determined the slope of the 

 hills, and the direction of the valley at the spot. Wherever you 

 look across a valley, you have a plane facing you, or making a small 

 angle with the surface, dipping inward up the valley. These 

 divisional planes are not in general, certainly not always, planes of 

 stratification ; they might be called planes of cleavage, if it is re- 

 membered that the rock is often in vast blocks, and not in the least 

 slaty ; and are intersected by minor divisional planes or joints. In 

 ignorance what the best name for them is, I have called them the 

 principal divisional planes. It was therefore forced upon me that 

 the forms of these valleys were determined by the disposition and 

 flexures of the principal divisional planes of the rocks. Moreover 

 the forms and position of the masses of rocJies moutonnees are 

 similarly dependent on the disposition of these planes. Where 

 there is a ridge of roches moutonnees across a valley, I almost 

 always found that the joints were wide apart, and the dip of the 

 planes was up the valley. In other words, the blocks of rock were 

 so placed that the moving ice had no advantageous hold on them. 



