during the present period in Denmark. 159 



Nearer to the present shore (see accompanying woodcut) , at a height of about 

 forty feet, the first beach may be observed on Bornholm. Wherever the granitic 

 mountains recede a little from the coast and form a small bay, the granite pebbles 

 of the beach appear to have choked it up, and to have separated a small pond from 

 the sea, which in the course of ages has been filled with peat. This ridge has 

 only a small breadth and slopes towards the shore at an angle of 15°, forming 

 a wall of about ten feet high, and abutting on a plain entirely formed of beach- 

 stones. This plain is completely horizontal and has a breadth of about 160 

 feet. It is surrounded by another plain of about 100 feet broad, inclining toward 

 the sea at an angle of 9° or 10°, to which succeeds the present beach, sloping at 

 an angle of 12° or 13° ; the pebbles are of uniform size throughout the beach, and 

 consist of the same granite as the solid rock. My explanation of these facts is the 

 following : after the inundation before mentioned, and which I conceive entirely 

 changed the face of Bornholm and the rest of Denmark, a beach was produced at 

 the shore, but I infer that its accumulation was interrupted by an earthquake, which 

 suddenly threw up the island about ten feet ; and that a very long period of per- 

 fect quiet followed, during which no elevation took place, but the horizontal beach 

 was formed. Subsequently I am of opinion a continuous but very slow rising be- 

 gan, which formed the sloping beach ; and, according to observations of the inhabit- 

 ants and my own, this rising is still in progress. On this sloping beach are graves 

 marked merely by a ring of stones, a little larger than the general size of the beach- 

 stones, and very different in structure from the graves which our heathen ances- 

 tors erected. Now, according to a communication from Mr. Finn Magnussen, 

 it was a custom in the northern countries to bury the early Christians on the beach 

 where the sea and land separated, and when afterwards the Christians got the 

 power, the same kind of sepulchre was used for the heathens. This happened 

 about the year 900, and vi^e may consequently come to something like a rough 

 calculation as to the time when this beach was formed. The elevation of the 

 island, as shown by the sloping beach, would thus have been about one foot in a 

 century, and the beginning of the regular elevation of the island would have been 

 about 1 600 years ago. The slope being completely regular, it is most probable 

 that the rise of the island and the lateral addition to the beach were quite uniform 

 during the whole period ; and by supposing this lateral extension to have been 

 equally uniform during the formation of the horizontal beach, we require 2500 

 years for the gradual accumulation of the horizontal beach, which carries back 

 the era of the great earthquake to about 4000 years before our time. I do not 

 pretend to say that this chronological calculation can be by any means exact, yet 

 I think it may be of some use ; and future observers on Bornholm, availing them- 



