314 ■ THE GEOLOGIST. 
hundred feet above the sea. I brought home many specimens, which are novr 
in the museum of the Geological Society. Could an approximation to the age 
of these bones be in any way arrived at, they would give some chronological 
data for determining the time which the land whereon they are found lias been 
in emerging from the sea and attaining its present level. My own impression, 
for many reasons, is that the whole of Spitzbergen has been gradually rising 
within the last few hundred years, and that this upheaval is still continuing. 
It is, perhaps, impossible to judge of the length of time which such enormous 
bones may endure in a climate like this, where they are bound up in ice for 
eight or nine months out of the twelve ; but allowing, at a guess, four hundred 
years for bones lying at an elevation of forty feet (which is about the highest 
at which I have found entire skeletons), and adding twelve feet of water for 
the whale to have floated in when he died there, we shall arrive at thirteen feet 
'per century as the rate of elevation. From the position of the eleven jaw- 
bones, &c., which I have just mentioned, and from the fact of so many lying 
together in a slight hollow, I am inclined to believe that these are the remains 
of whales killed by men, and that they were towed into this hollow (then a 
shallow bav) for the purpose of being flensed there. We learn from the 
accounts of the early whale-fishers that their usual practice was to flense their 
whales in the bays ; and, in fact, that the whales were so abundant close to the 
shore that tlie ships did not require to leave their anchorage in the bays at all. 
It was about the year 1650 that the whale-fishery in the bays of Spitzbergen 
was in its prime ; thus, supposing these whales to have been killed in that bay 
two hundred years ago, allowing three fathoms (the very minimum) for the 
ship to have anchored in, and adding the ten feet which the bones are now 
above the sea-level, we have twenty-eight feet of elevation in two hundi*ed 
years, or very nearly tlie same rate as I arrived at by the other example." 
(Page 200, et seg.) 
With regard to the disappearance of the whale (Mysticetus) from the shores 
of Spitzbergen, Mr. Lamont remarks : " I believe the principal reason to be 
that the seas around Spitzbergen have become too shalloic for them : this is 
the general belief of the sealers frequenting the coast, only they generally ' put 
the cart before the horse,' by saying that the ' sea is going back.' I have 
heard the same remark made by the sailors and fishermen on the west coast of 
Norway, where Sir Charles Lyell (' Principles of Geology,' p. 506) has shown 
to demonstration that the coast -line is rising at the rate of four feet per cen- 
tury. On this island I observed a further most interesting proof of its elevation. 
This was a sort of trench or furrow of about a lumdred yards long, three or 
four feet deep, and about four feet broad, which was ploughed up amongst the 
boulders ; it was about twenty feet above the sea-level, and extended from 
north-east to south-west, being exactly the line in which the current-borne ice 
travels at the present day ; so that I presume there is no doubt it must haye 
been caused by the passage of a heavy ice-berg while the island lay under 
water." Thus far has M. Lamont contributed information towards the eluci- 
dation of the problems connected with the recent upheaval of the European 
area — a subject of high interest now-a-days, especially in connection with the 
question of the relative antiquity of the stone implements of human manufac- 
ture found in caves and gravel above the present sea-level. 
The southern half of Spitzbergen appears to consist chiefly of Carboniferous 
rocks (Coal-measures (?) and Mountain-limestone), of which M. Lamont brought 
numerous characteristic specimens to England (now in the museum of the 
Geological Society) ; and, from a comparison of his observations with the col- 
lection of rocks made in the southern part of Spizbergen by Parry and Poster, 
in 1827, it would appear that the trap-rocks, sandstones, shales, and limestones 
of the south are represented in the north by marble and compact limestone. 
