448 Fiords. 



eluded all those glacial influences that polished and 

 grooved rocks and scattered erratic boulders. 



Ever since exact Admiralty charts were published, 

 it has been well known that our fiords are generally 

 shallower at their mouths than further up, and it is 

 more than thirty years ago since Mr. Charles Darwin 

 observed, that ' Tierra del Fuego may be described as a 

 mountainous land, partly submerged in the sea, so that 

 deep inlets and bays occupy the place where valleys 

 should exist' ('Journal of a Naturalist'). He has also 

 remarked that the fiords are generally shallower towards 

 their mouths than in the interior, at that time attri- 

 buting this fact to the gathering of sediments on those 

 exposed parts of the coast that are more subject to 

 the abrading action of the sea than they are in the 

 stiller interior reaches. In my memoir on Lakes, pub- 

 lished in 1862, 1 stated of Scotland and Norway that the 

 fiords and lochs are the prolongation of valleys down which 

 glaciers flowed, and each was itself filled with a glacier, 

 and I attributed the origin of their deep interior 

 basins to the grinding power of glacier-ice ; and in 1 865, 

 in the ' Philosophical Magazine,' I compared their inner 

 great depths to those of Loch Lomond, itself once a fiord 

 and a true rock-bound basin ; for, in among the group 

 of beautiful islands, mere striated roches moutonnees, 

 near the outflow of the Leven, the water is only from 

 8 to 17 fathoms deep, while opposite Ben Lomond it 

 deepens to 89 fathoms, or 534 feet, and above Tarbet 

 opposite Culness to 105 fathoms, or 630 feet. If the 

 country were to sink 20 feet, the surface of Loch 

 Lomond would be at the level of the sea, and a few 

 feet of additional depression would again convert 

 it into a fiord like Loch Long, Loch Fyne, or Loch 

 Etive. 



