26 
TENTH REPORT. 
our fields in southern Michigan have abundant mineral matter from the 
country north of our Lakes, and Scandinavian rock waste abounds in Eng- 
land. Germany and West Russia. It was in that sweeping process that our 
field stones, so much firmer and more suitable for building purposes than the 
rocks found by deep borings under us here — were imported, mostly from 
Canadian territory. 
We know our north country to be a wilderness of rock and forest, there- 
fore a vacation ground for the denser population to the south. It is likely 
always to remain so, not as any result of the newness of American settlement, 
but it rests on physiographic grounds as in our European example after 
long centuries of effort. The physiographic contrast in Europe is stronger 
than here as we shall now see and where our population falls off from thirty 
to the mile south of our Lakes to three or four on the north, Germany with 
two hundred is to be contrasted to Norway with eighteen. 
It is precisely in Western Norway that the land is rockiest, there where 
the sea penetrates deeply into the land in the three great Fiords, Hardanger, 
Sogne and Northfiord, extending even sixty miles from the ocean. Offshore 
is an island swarm identical in origin with the Ten Thousand Islands of 
Georgian Bay and innumerable channels between. The waters are still, 
so still it is hard to believe them a portion of the Atlantic Ocean, but any 
wider space between the islands at once sets our little steamer rolling vio- 
lently. Nubbled, rounded and hummocky are the rocks all along; on the 
face toward the land picked out with heather in every crevice but on the 
ocean side brown and bare. Where shall man live in such a region? We 
turn a corner to the eastward and enter the harbor of Bergen. It is one of 
the best footholds west Norway affords. To appreciate it better let us turn 
our backs on the city as if starting on up the coast to northward and there 
we see man again losing his foothold on the crumpled rock. The houses 
seem to cling as long as the slope is gentle enough to let them stick, but it 
is dirt that is scarcer even than houseroom here. 
Bergen lies at the mouth of a mile- wide valley that continues for several 
miles to the south and west until it comes again to the sea. It has no river 
but lies flat-bottomed and floored by park-like fields and estates between 
cliffs a thousand to fifteen hundred feet in height. It needs but a gentle 
depression to sink the valley floor beneath the sea and produce another 
sound-like passage among islands. Such it was not many thousand years ago. 
This soil gathered on the sea bottom, the washings of the land, and almost 
every foothold man has found in the region has originated in a similar way. 
The seventy thousand people find it footing scant enough. We may see the 
city streets climbing high on the valley wall, macadamized, supported by 
granite walls where the zigzags double on each other and provided with iron 
hand rails for the foot passenger. The steepness allows the houses to have 
street entrances at each story. This portion of the city a member of the 
Norse parliament told me, was not used for residence by the well-to-do 
classes, not because it was not good for house sites but the land was so cheap 
there that the poor crowded them out. He did not entertain the idea that 
there was a geographic reason for this cheapness. But we may go far above 
the highest of the houses, following the admirable road to a height of a thou- 
sand feet on a shoulder of hillside where we may rest at a little restaurant 
and look out across the whole region, solitary upland, populous valley, fiord, 
island and Atlantic. Behind the restaurant a narrower path- leads on and 
we soon have before us a sample of the stuff the land is made of. We are 
at an elevation of twelve hundred feet on a mile wide bench. Across the 
