1846.] MURCHISON ON THE SCANDINAVIAN DRIFT. 365 



Similar appearances, although by no means so clearly defined, are 

 to be seen in the groups of islands between Weotervik in the parallel 

 of North Gothland and Nykoping, which I merely passed near in a 

 steam-boat, without having an opportunity of closely observing the 

 facts, and I therefore pass on to the district extending from Nykoping 

 to Stockholm. By inspecting the map of Forsell, it will be seen that 

 most of the numerous cavities occupied by water in this tract, with 

 the exception of the great Malar Lake, trend from N. by W. to 

 S. by E., and such is the chief direction in which the linear accu- 

 mulations of gravel and sand, or 'osar,' have been formed. Such 

 also is the direction in which the subjacent rocks have been ground 

 down and striated. Many of these osar are well-seen, indeed, be- 

 tween Nykoping and the sea, where the great Stockholm canal has 

 been cut through them, and where shells of the Baltic Sea, as pre- 

 viously mentioned by Mr. Lyell, are seen in blue clay beneath the 

 great mass of the osar drift, again indicating in the clearest manner 

 a submarine condition when such drift was transported. Passing 

 from Sodertelge through the southern arm of the Malar Lake, the 

 traveller is then conducted to Stockholm in one of the chief arms 

 of that sheet of. water, which as it is on the whole directed from 

 W.S.W. to E.N.E., is transverse to the main direction which the 

 drift has taken in this part of the country. To one who has ex- 

 plored by land and in detail those phaenomena, to many of which I 

 shall afterwards have to direct attention, the south and north sides of 

 this arm of water, extending even up to the gates of Stockholm, offer 

 the most striking confirmation of the agency of a great force which 

 has ground down the one and left the other comparatively unaltered. 

 The scarped, picturesque and broken rocks on the north side and 

 the side facing the south offer indeed a most striking contrast to the 

 abraded, sloped and polished surfaces on the other side of the lake 

 which faces to the north. The environs of Stockholm abound also 

 in such examples, and exhibit admirable instances of osar ; that of 

 Bronkeberg, to which one district of the city extends, affording as 

 clear evidence as can possibly be given, since the rounded mate- 

 rials are there piled up to the height of 100 feet or more, and 

 many of them exceed the size of the largest man's head. Po- 

 lished and scratched surfaces abound, and no example is more 

 remarkable than one, to which Baron Berzelius directed my atten- 

 tion in 1844, a little to the N.W. of Stockholm, where a buttress 

 of hard and highly crystalline gneiss with veins of grey granite 

 had been laid bare in improving the roads, and exhibited nume- 

 rous striae having a general direction from N. by W. to S. by E., 

 though there occurred between the different markings just those 

 deviations from parallelism which we might expect to result in 

 the case of a rush of broken drifted materials, however solid the 

 whole mass and however determinate its general line of transport. 

 1'he same rock, equally polished and ground down, has been since 

 laid bare and freed from its coating of gravel and sand to th(^ N.W. 

 of the Park of Haghe, on the other side of which it forms abrupt 

 and picturesque cliffs. Passing in a direction a little west of north 



VOL. II. PART I. 2 B 



