543 
of Edinburgh, Session 1865 - 66 . 
gradually melt away. The smaller pieces, however, often find their 
way into the stream by which the lake discharges itself, and are 
then carried down into the fjord. From the mean of several ob- 
servations taken with the aneroid, I estimated the surface of this 
lake to be about 25 feet above the level of high water in the fjord. 
We had no means of measuring its depth, yet, from the slope of the 
glacier, it may be inferred that the bottom of the ice is probably 
lower than the level of the sea. 
Proofs that the glacier was once much larger than it is now, may 
he well seen on the west side of the valley, a little above the lake. 
The shelving slopes of the mountain for several hundred feet 
upward have been shorn smooth, grooved, and striated, and every 
polished hummock of rock is loaded with huge fragments of stone, 
and heaps of earth and angular rubbish. Here, as at every gla- 
cier we visited, the glaciation of the rocks was exactly similar, down 
to the minutest detail, vvith that of the coast and outer islets, as well 
as with that of the Scottish glens and sea-lochs. 
But the feature which most interested us was the relation of 
this large glacier of Fondalen to the marine deposits of the loca- 
lity. The foregoing sketch (fig 4.) shows that the high terrace so 
marked along the sides of the Holands Fjord enters this valley, and 
extends on the western mountain side, at least, as far as the foot of 
the glacier. Hence the gravelly plain and the moraine mounds that 
separate the glacier from the fjord are overlooked on either side 
by a raised sea-beach. In examining attentively the nature of the 
material of which the mounds nearest the glacier were composed, we 
were struck with its difference from the loose, coarse character of 
the ordinary moraine rubbish, and its resemblance to the upper 
boulder-clay of Scotland. The glacier is pushing great noses of 
ice into and over those mounds, so that freshlj^ exposed sections are 
abundant. The deposit is a loose sandy clay or earth full of stones, 
among which the percentage of striated specimens is not large. 
The larger blocks of gneiss and schist appeared to us not to occur in 
this clay, but to be tumbled down upon it from the surface of the gla- 
cier. We had hardly begun to look over a surface of the clay, ere 
we found fragments of shells, and in the course of a few minutes 
we picked up several handfuls, chiefly of broken pieces of Cyprina 
IsJandica, but including also single valves of Astarte compressa, &c. 
4 B 
VOL. V. 
