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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
of short independent streams on the western coast ; and on the 
eastern side, the broad undulating lowlands sending their collected 
drainage into ’large rivers, which enter the sea along a com- 
paratively little embayed coast-line, are familiar features on the 
maps of both countries. This general outward semblance, which 
at once arrests the attention of every traveller in Norway, to whom 
the scenery of the western Highlands is familiar, depends upon 
a close similarity in the geological structure of the rocks, and a 
coincidence in the geological history of the surface of the two 
regions. Norway, from south to north, is almost wholly made up 
of metamorphic rocks, not all of the same age, yet possessing a 
general similarity of character. In like manner, the west of Scot- 
land, from the Mull of Oantyre to Cape Wrath, is in great measure 
built up of gneiss, schist, slate, quartz-rock, granite, and other 
metamorphic rocks, quite comparable with these of Norway.* 
* My friend Herr Tellef Dalill, who, in conjunction with Dr Kjerulf, is 
carrying on the Government Geological Survey of Norway, wrote down for 
me the following order of superposition of the rocks of the south of Norway. 
He was not at the time acquainted with the order of succession in the north- 
west of Scotland, and expressed his surprise and pleasure to find that it cor- 
roborated so well the order established by his colleague and himself. I place 
in parallel columns the Norwegian and Scottish rocks, to show the general 
parallelism, without wishing to insist that the equivalents suggested here are 
in each case strictly exact. 
Devonian ? 
Upper Silurian. 
Norway. 
N. W. Highlands. 
Lower Old Red Sandstone. 
Lower 
Silurian 
Schists, gneiss, and 
gneissose and schistoze 
rocks. 
Quartz-rockand limestones. 
Schists with Dictyonema norvegica. 
Sparagmite and schists, about 2000 ft. 
? Slates of N.-W. of Islay 
= Lingula flags ? 
Red Sandstone and conglomerate oc- 
casionally present here. These and 
the overlying strata rest quite uncon- 
formably upon the 
quite uncon- 
Red Sandstone and conglo- 
merate (Cambrian) lying 
unconformably on the 
Tellemarken formation — a vast suc- 
cession of metamorphic rocks. 
Fundamental or Laurentian 
gneiss. 
Tills parallelism may require considerable modification, but it is at least 
