374- PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [April 8, 



traversing from the Siljan to the Wenjan Lake and the station of 

 Johannishohn, we passed through a country of low-wooded porphyry 

 peaks, the parent rock of which, as in the case of the granites men- 

 tioned above, is almost entirely obscured by vast quantities of local 

 angular blocks, whilst the rounded materials in the lower grounds or 

 valleys are more varied, and occasionally constitute coarse osar. In 

 approaching Johannishohn however, the observer is suddenly struck 

 with the appearance of a quantity of debris of sandstone, and on 

 turning to the north he has only to travel for a few miles along the 

 eastern shore of the Wenjan Lake to perceive that all other detritus 

 disappears, the whole mass consisting of angular blocks, occasion- 

 ally of enormous size, composed of hard, red, purplish, greenish or 

 whitish sandstone. These constitute, in truth, the mere cover of a 

 vast expanse of horizontal sandstone, which further to the north is 

 detected beneath this chaos, and which I shall give reasons for be- 

 lieving, in a subsequent memoir, to be the equivalent of the old red 

 sandstone of the British Isles, and therefore of the same age as rocks 

 which I have described in Norway. This great sandstone range is, 

 in fact, encased between great bands of porphyry that occupy wooded 

 hills, the eastern limit of which is that traversed in passing from the 

 Siljan to the Wenjan Lake, while the other limit forms the western 

 bank of the latter lake. In this way, by passing from east to west 

 or west to east across the southern ends of such ranges, the observer 

 can correctly define how truly the Swedish detritus has been pro- 

 pelled in trainees deviating slightly only to the east and west of their 

 general direction from north to south. But the chief point on which 

 I wish to dwell, is the extraordinary aspect presented by this " felsen- 

 meer " or " cherres" of enormous angular blocks of finely laminated 

 sandstone, which occupy a tract many miles in length, no part of 

 which is more than 100 or 200 feet above the lake*. My compa- 

 nion and myself were absolutely lost in astonishment at the scene 

 which lay before us as we penetrated further and further into the 

 undulating woodlands of this chaos, the confusion of whose piles of 

 angular sandstone over a wide flat district is here and there quite as 

 striking as if the debris were lying on the steep slopes of the Alps, 

 whether at Rosbach in the canton of Schweitz, or in many other 

 known localities, where, from subsidences on the sides of inland or ma- 



* The reader will bear in mind, that although the higher parts of Dalecarlia are 

 rather more mountainous than the portion of Sweden to the south of them, there 

 is rarely a porphyry summit which exceeds 1200 or 1500 feet above the sea, whilst 

 the depressions, whether occupied by rivers or inosculating river lakes, are at very 

 small elevations above the sea, and the whole drainage of the region is most 

 tranquil. In short, Dalecarlia (from which the rivers descend to the sea at quite 

 as small inclinations as in the sloping and flat tracts of England and France) is as 

 anti-glacier a country as can be well imagined, and is only surpassed in that cha- 

 racter by the great mass of the Scandinavian continent to the south of it. At 

 the confines of Norway the elevations begin however to assume an Alpine cha- 

 racter, and there (within certain limits) the glacialist might begin to apply his 

 theory. But even there he is met by M. Durocher, who has observed and de- 

 scribed large horizontal tracts of sand in which the quartz grains only remain, 

 the mica and felspar of the original matrix having been dissolved and washed 

 away, — a condition of things only to be explained by aqueous causes. 



