530 
ROCKS OF THE NORTH NOT STRIATED BY GLACIERS. 
countries (of which hereafter), we think that its application to Scandinavia, Lap- 
land and the northernmost limits of Russia proper, will to a great extent solve our 
problem. Before this chapter is concluded we will go a step further, and looking 
back to the region itself, which may be supposed to have been glacial, because it is 
the seat of the origin of the transported blocks, we shall see how far the phenomena 
which it presents accord with our views. 
In Russia our time only permitted us to examine personally the southern edges 
of the rocky or northern region from whence all the detritus has travelled ; but we 
there actually saw in the government of Olonetz examples of the polished surfaces 
of hard rocks accompanied by many parallel scratches, all of which, as w r e before 
said, proceeded from north-north-west to south- south-east. These polished and 
scratched sui faces are exactly like those with which we have been long familiar in 
parts of Scotland, and are, as it will be shown, common to all regions of hard rock 
over which drift and blocks have moved. 
The direction of the scratches on the rocks in the environs of Petrozavodsk is pre- 
cisely coincident w r ith the major axis of the Great Lake (almost a freshwater sea), 
and of all the minor parallel lakes of this region. No one can inspect a map of 
this tract without being forcibly struck by the parallelisms of these numerous long 
and narrow lakes, the longer axes of which, like those of Finland, are all directed 
from north-north-east to south-south-west, or in the same line as the drift. Seeing 
that these lakes, in the region to which we now allude, are flanked by long parallel 
ridges ot plutonic rocks, we are disposed to think, that the cavities now occupied 
by water may have resulted from ancient cracks or fissures. During six months of 
the year they are still covered with ice, to some of the operations of which we 
shall advert in the next chapter. 
And here we beg to be excused, for again showing the utter inapplicability of the 
subaerial glacial theory to the Russian phsenomena. An essential condition in that 
theory, as modified by Professor James Forbes, is the existence of high mountains 
from the edges of which glaciers may have gravitated into contiguous lower grounds ; 
for no modern glacier has been formed without such conditions. Even at Spitzbergen 
and in the highest latitudes, the French naturalist M. Martens has observed, that 
the formation of a glacier is invariably dependent on the inclination and form 
of the ground, the valleys of great width and with open sides being necessarily void 
of them ; for in such situations the accumulated snow never consolidates into a 
glacier. Now in the region near the lake Onega there are no mountains either 
