go 



northern highlands of Norway, did not even reach the small islands 

 off the shore, much less could it have proceeded across the North 

 Sea. He examined an extensive district of the coast line and many 

 fiords and sounds, one 120 kilometres in length, and a coast line 90 

 kilometres long, and in none of these could any signs be found that 

 inland ice had traversed them on its way to the coast. Not only 

 were the ro ks unworn by ice action, but there were no moraine 

 drift deposit! or travelled blocks or boulders, except in places where 

 they are evidently due to shore-ice or small local glaciers. Of Bals 

 fiord, a large and important inlet which could not possibly have 

 escaped, Mr. Petersen says, " I have therefore come to the con- 

 clusion that the continuous ice-stream of the glacial period cannot 

 have reached beyond the basin of the fiord. From the premises thus 

 set forth," he concludes, " we may draw the deduction that the 

 inland ice in North Norway, during the glacial age, did not move 

 forward through the sounds to the ocean." Turning now to South 

 Norway, the evidence there also seems to point to the action of 

 shore-ice and small local glaciers as affecting the rocks and depositing 

 erratics at the coast, but such evidence is wanting above a height of 

 1 20ft.* Another authority, Mr. M. F. Stanley, f.g.s., in a paper 

 read before the Geological Society in 1887, said of Norway, " The 

 aspect of the coast for hundreds of miles consecutively has a uniform 

 character of jagged and pointed rocks nearly to the sea-level. At 

 the mouths of the fiords the rocks are more rounded, particularly at 

 heights less than 100 feet." Again he expressed the opinion that 

 ci ice had never prevailed along the entire west coast of Norway, 

 neither had inland ice of any considerable thickness flowed over this 

 coast in sufficient volume to wear off the points of the sharply 

 fractured granite. Even the rocks below 100 feet are not more worn 

 than is sometimes the case in tropical climates. The ' shark's teeth ' 

 of the Lofodens have not been planed down, nor is there any vestige 

 of the great ice-sheet of our text books within the Arctic circle upon 

 the coast of Norway." Petersen, after his thorough exploration of 

 the Norwegian coast, arrived at a similar conclusion, and says, "My 

 deduction, therefore, is that the theory of the ice streams from the 

 Scandinavian peninsula having advanced and covered the North 

 Sea, the Baltic, and reached the central European plain, England, 

 the Orkneys and the Shetlands, cannot, with the facts at our 

 disposal, be accepted as a scientific doctrine."! These apparently 

 insuperable difficulties to the great ice-sheet theory are also described 

 by Professor Bonney in his " Ice Work, past and present." \ The 

 same authority also lays stress upon another difficulty, that of 

 imagining by what forces the Scandinavian land-ice can possibly 

 have extended to our east coast, pointing out that even were the 

 vis a tergo sufficient to propel it so far, in following the line of least 

 resistance it would rather have gone southwards towards the English 

 Channel than over the British Isles. The two hypotheses invented 

 to escape this difficulty — one that the valley of the North Sea was 

 raised up to a flat surface during the glacial period, and the other 



* Nature, vol. xxx, pp. 202-205. 

 t Nature, in loco cit. \ page 77, et seq. 



