Ch. X.] RECENT STRATA IN SWEDEN". 11? 



W., the amount of elevation always increasing as we proceed tow^ard? 

 the North Cape, where it may equal 5 feet in a century. If we could 

 assume that there had been an average rise of 2-i- feet in each hundred 

 years for the last fifty centuries, this would give an elevation of 125 feet 

 in that period. In other words, it would follow that the shores, and a 

 considerable area of the former bed of the Baltic and North Sea, had 

 been uplifted vertically to that amount, and converted into land in the 

 coui'se of the last 5000 years. Accordingly, we find near Stockholm, in 

 Sweden, horizontal beds of sand, loam, and marl containing the same 

 peculiar assemblage of testacea which now live in the brackish waters 

 of the Baltic. Mingled with these, at different depths, have been de- 

 tected various works of art implying a rude state of civilization, and 

 some vessels built before the introduction of iron, the whole marine 

 formation having been upraised, so that the upper beds are now 60 feet 

 higher than the surface of the Baltic. In the neighborhood of these 

 recent strata, both to the northwest and south of Stockholm, other 

 deposits similar in mineral composition occur, which ascend to greater 

 heights, in which precisely the same assemblage of fossil shells is met 

 with, but without any intermixture of human bones or fabricated articles. 



On the opposite or w^estern coast of Sweden, at Uddevalla, post-plio- 

 cene strata, containing recent shells, not of that brackish water character 

 peculiar to the Baltic, but such as now live in the northern ocean, ascend 

 to the height of 200 feet ; and beds of clay and sand of the same age 

 attain elevations of 300 and even 700 feet in jSTorway, where they have 

 been usually described as " raised beaches." They are, however, thick 

 deposits of submarine origin, spreading ftir and wide, and filling valleys 

 in the granite and gneiss, just as the tertiary formations, in different 

 parts of Europe, cover or fill depressions in the older rocks. 



It is w^orthy of remark, that although the fossil fauna characterizing 

 these upraised sands and clays consists exclusively of existing northern 

 species of testacea, yet, according to Loven (an able living naturalist of 

 Norway), the species do not constitute such an assemblage as now in- 

 habits corresponding latitudes in the German Ocean. On the contrary, 

 they decidedly represent a more arctic fauna.'* In order to find the 

 same species flourishing in equal abundance, or in many cases to find 

 them at all, we must go northwards to higher latitudes than Uddevalla 

 in Sweden, or even nearer the pole than Central Norway. 



Judging by the uniformity of climate now prevailing from century to 

 century, and the insensible rate of variation in the organic world in our 

 own times, we may presume that an extremely lengthened period was 

 required even for so slight a modification of the molluscous fauna, as 

 that of which the evidence is here brought to light. On the other hand, 

 we have every reason for inferring on independent gi-ounds (namely, the 

 rate of upheaval of land in modern times) that the antiquity of the 

 deposits in question must be very great. For if we assume, as before 



* Quart. GeoL Journ. 4 Mems. p. 48 



