2 Mr Theodore Kjerulf on the Phenomena 
reproduce, if not the very words, for which space was often 
wanting, yet at least always, and strictly, the views ex- 
pressed by Mr Kjerulf ; and wherever he has felt that the 
responsibility of a statement or an inference rested with 
himself, he has put it in the form of a note.— Translator. | 
It is well known that the surface of our mountains is in 
many places scoured, polished, striated, and bared, and that 
at times to a height of 4000 or even 5000 feet above the 
sea. All over the country such surfaces may be seen; for as 
the country is covered with mountains, so are the mountains 
with scratches. These had attracted the attention of scien- 
tific miners in Sweden, but Sefstrém was the first to study 
them carefully. He remarked that the strize followed a 
determinate direction, and bore a relation to the course in 
which the boulders of the country had travelled. Thus the 
furrows follow a southerly direction; and in like manner 
the porphyry blocks of Elfdal have been carried south to 
Landskab, where they now lie among totally. different for- 
mations. Hence he inferred that the direction pervading 
the entire phenomenon was one from north to south. He 
believed that the agent in all this was a flood—a vast mass 
of boulders, stones, debris, and sand swept away by water, 
which had poured across the mountains with incredible 
rapidity and force, sufficient to make the large stones slide 
over the surface of the mountains and scratch these, as a 
grain of sand will do when made to grate along under the 
finger over a marble slab ; while the smaller masses were 
ground against each other, and left piled up in the long 
backed Asar of Sweden, the Raer of our Smaalehn district. 
Sefstrém’s paper is found in the Kongl. Vetenskaps Akad. 
Handl., 1836. 
Hoffmann, Pusch, and Bohtlingk, suggested a different 
direction for the phenomena. They showed that the erratic 
blocks are distributed over the flat of Northern Europe in 
a great circle, of which Scandinavia and Finland form the 
centre—that in Northern Russia, the blocks are Finnish ; 
in Poland, are mixed with Swedish; in the Netherlands 
and North Germany, are Norwegian and Swedish—that 
beyond these limits the blocks have not travelled—and that 
