Scottish Lakes. 447 



Sutherland, which rises sharp and steep-sided above a 

 broad, bare, undulating plateau of gneiss (p. 289) and let 

 him count the lakes, large and small, seen from the top. 

 In 1859, on one side alone I counted forty-two, and- 

 turning round to count those on the other sides, I 

 thought their name is legion ! and gave it up. I cannot 

 assert that each one is a rock-basin, but everyone that 

 I visited, not there alone, but in other Highland areas, 

 is so, and it is simply absurd to suppose that each tarn or 

 larger lake was provided with a special area of subsi- 

 dence wherein its water might lie, especially when many 

 of such hollows lie in one broad plateau. As for tilting 

 up the outlets of valleys, or the depression of their upper 

 reaches, it would indeed require a remarkable series of 

 tiltings to have produced the myriad lakes of Scotland, 

 Sweden, and North America, and it would be difficult to 

 give a reason why such unnumbered special tiltings 

 should have been confined to areas the surfaces of which 

 had all been subject to glaciation. 



Kock-bound basins are, however, not confined to 

 the land, for they are almost universal in the bottoms of 

 fiords, or, as they are called in Scotland, Salt- Water 

 Lochs, which so largely intersect all coasts where 

 glaciers are or have been. 



All Scotchmen who know the west coast are familiar 

 with these long, narrow, mountainous arms of the sea, 

 which any person capable of a grain of thought at once 

 recognises as seaward continuations of inland valleys, 

 which, it is well known, were, in Scotland and Norway, 

 filled with glaciers. As far as I know, Professor James 

 D. Dana, of Newhaven, U.S., was the first who dis- 

 tinctly stated that ' fiord-latitudes and drift-latitudes 

 are the same.' * In the term ' drift-latitudes ' are in- 

 1 ' Manual of Geology,' 1863, p. 543. 



