533 
of Edinburgh^ Session 1865 - 66 . 
-Besides the external resemblance due to the lithological nature of 
the rocks, beneath there is a still further likeness dependent upon 
similarity, partly of geological structure, and partly of denudation. 
Many of the Scottish sea-lochs have had their trend determined 
by lines of strike or of anticlinal axis, and the same result seems 
to have taken place in Norway. In other cases, the lochs and 
glens of the one country, and the fjords and valleys of the other, 
cannot be traced to any determining geological structure, but must 
be referred to the great process of denudation which has brought 
the surface to its present form.* In short, Norway and the 
Scottish Highlands seem to be but parts of one long table-land of 
palaeozoic (chiefly metamorphic) rocks. This table-land must be of 
venerable antiquity; for it seems to have been in existence, at 
least in part, as far back as the Lower Old Ked Sandstone. Since 
that time it has been sorely defaced by long cycles of geological 
revolution ; rains, rivers, ice, and general atmospheric waste, have 
carved out of it the present valleys, and to all this surface change 
must be added the results of dislocations, as well as unequal up- 
heavals and depressions of the crust of the earth beneath. Never- 
theless, it still survives in extensive fragments in Norway, where 
it serves as a platform for the great snow-fields, while it can even 
yet be traced along the undulating summits of the mountains of 
the Scottish Highlands. One of its latest great revolutions was a 
submergence towards the west, which extended from the coasts of 
Ireland to the north of Norway, and gave rise to some of the most 
distinctive features of that part of Europe. No one can attentively 
consider the maps of the countries between the headlands of Con- 
naught and the North Cape, without being convinced that the 
endless ramifying sea-lochs and fjords, kyles and sounds, were once 
land valleys. Each loch and fjord is the submerged part of a 
valley, of which we still see the upper portion above water, and the 
important at present in showing that, both in Norway and in Scotland, there 
is a bottom gneiss covered unconform ably by strata containing fossils, and 
that these strata are again overlaid by an upper and later series, of meta- 
morphic rocks of Lower Silurian age. 
* I have tried to trace the history of this process in the case of the Scottish 
Highlands, and I may be permitted to refer to “ The Scenery of Scotland, 
viewed in connection with its Pliysical Geology,” chap. vi. 
