lxXXlV PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May 1904, 



marine organisms upon terra Jirma ; and this argument must be 

 admitted to be in most cases sound. But it is now recognized 

 that the mere occurrence of these organisms may not be itself 

 a proof of former submergence, for they may by various means 

 be transported to the land, without necessarily implying any 

 change of level. We know, for example, that by a body of ice, 

 moving out of a sea-basin upon the land, the shells of a sea-floor 

 may be scraped up and carried above sea-level. Up to what 

 heights this kind of transport is possible, or probable, we cannot 

 at present say. But that it is a vera causa seems to be put beyond 

 question by the broken condition of the shells, the mixture of species 

 belonging to very different depths, and the manner in which they 

 are dispersed through the various kinds of Drift in which they lie. 



To keep the discussion within due bounds, I shall limit my 

 remarks to the evidence of emergence supplied by what we call 

 Raised Beaches. Geologists in the British Isles have long indulged 

 the confident belief that these beaches afford demonstrative proof 

 of changes in the relative levels of sea and land. The abundant 

 and striking examples of them around our coasts have been 

 universally accepted among us as marking former sea-margins, 

 whether the sea be supposed to have risen upon the land or the 

 land to have been upheaved above the sea. The recurrence of 

 precisely-similar terraces along the western coast of Norway, but 

 on a still more impressive scale, has been regarded as furnishing 

 evidence of an extensive emergence of land, from the south of 

 Britain to the northern end of the Scandinavian peninsula. 

 Prof. Suess, however, seeks to show that, at least as regards 

 the north-western coast of Norway, these opinions are based upon 

 a misreading of the evidence. After his visit to that region, and 

 his study of the literature of the strand-lines there so wonderfully 

 developed, he has come to the conclusion that the Norwegian fjords 

 furnish no argument against his doctrine that there has been no 

 recent upheaval of the land. He asserts that 



' we must interpret all the seter frock-shelves] and the great majority of the 

 terraces in the fjords of Western Norway as proofs of the retreat of the ice that 

 once covered so much of the peninsula, and not as proofs of any oscillations of 

 the surface of the sea, still less of any movement of the solid land.' l 



It would widen the enquiry too much to enter upon an exami- 

 nation of the evidence, as it is presented in Scandinavia. But, 

 having myself been all my life familiar with the strand-lines of this 



1 ' Das Autlitz der Erde ' vol. ii (1888) p. 457. 



