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various depths in them, lie trunks of trees, especially of the 

 Scotch fir (Pinus sylvestris), often three feet in diameter, which 

 must have grown on the margin of the peat-mosses, and 

 frequently fallen into them. This tree is not now, nor has 

 ever been in historical times, a native of the Danish islands, 

 and when introduced there, has not thriven ; yet it was 

 evidently indigenous in the human period, for Steenstrup has 

 taken out with his own hands a flint instrument from below 

 a buried trunk of one of these pines. It appears clear that 

 the same Scotch fir was afterwards supplanted by the sessile 

 variety of the common oak, of which many prostrate trunks 

 occur in the peat, at higher levels than the pines ; and still 

 higher, the pedunculated variety of the same oak (Quercus 

 rohir) occurs, with the alder, birch, and hazel. The oak has 

 now, in its turn, been almost superseded in Denmark by the 

 common beech.' The trace of the first race of men— that of 

 the Stone Age — having been found beneath the peat deposit 

 containing the pines, which have never been known to live 

 in Denmark, and which must have taken of themselves 

 centuries to acquire the bulk described above, affords us 

 some idea of the enormous lapse of time which must have 

 intervened between the period of the making of that single 

 flint weapon and the present day. The testimony supplied 

 by the shell mounds of various countries, and the ancient 

 Swiss dwellings, is given at length ; and on the subject of 

 upraised strata in Sweden and Norway, the information is most 

 copious. In calculating the time required in elevating those 

 deposits of Norway, some of which, containing recent shells, 

 reach a height of 600 feet, Sir Charles writes : ' A mean rate 

 of continuous vertical elevation of two and a half feet in a 

 century would, I conceive, be a high average ; yet, even if this 

 be assumed, it would require 24,000 years for parts of the 

 sea-coast of Norway, where the post-tertiary marine strata 

 occur, to attain the height of 600 feet.' " 



