ALPINE HYPOTHESES INAPPLICABLE TO THE NORTH. 
531 
contiguous or distant ! Elevations of 400 and 500 feet in height above the adja- 
cent lakes, are indeed as prevalent to the south and east as they are to the north- 
west of the spots so scratched, and hence we are unable to imagine any process by 
which glaciers could have advanced, and always precisely in the same direction as 
all the great fissures of the country, and the far-transported blocks 1 . 
The same objections to the scratches and polishing by the action of glaciers, as 
those which have been mentioned in the case of the Lake Onega, may be urged in 
relation to very large countries in Scandinavia (also striated and polished) ; viz. 
the absence of mountains whence glaciers can have moved forward. In no district, 
perhaps, is this objection more apparent than on the eastern shores of the Bothnian 
Gulf, where the scratches and drift both proceed in a south-easterly direction. If 
these marks were caused by the movement of glaciers, advancing from the north- 
west, they must have proceeded from the opposite coast of Sweden, where there 
are no high grounds. Again, the great arm of the Baltic Sea (the Bothnian Gulf) 
intervenes s , and hence if a subaerial condition of things be imagined, this sea 
must then have been one permanent mass of ice, or a valley filled with glacial 
detritus through which the glaciers advanced from Sweden, before they imprinted 
their first scratches on the opposite shores of Finland. Such an inference would 
he, it is true, in one respect analogous to that part of the Alpine glacial theory by 
which M. Agassiz supposes, that not only the lake of Geneva hut all the deep 
chasms between the Alps and the Jura (a depth of many thousand feet) were for- 
merly filled up with solid ice. But even if we admit the much greater increment 
of ice, magnify the lake of Geneva into the Baltic, and abandon ourselves, for 
argument sake, to the Alpine hypothesis, how are we to explain the passage ot 
the blocks, not over the Baltic, but up into the hilly tracts of Finland, with 
anything like the present levels? Then, again, how imagine the advance ol 
1 M. Bohtlingk did not merely show, that the blocks are transported excentrically from Scandinavia 
and Lapland, but also that the rocks are invariably worn down and striated on the side from whence the 
drift has passed. See the arrows in the Map. PL VI., which rudely indicate such directions and phseno- 
mena around the nucleus of those northern countries. 
* Where we examined them, in the environs of Abo, as well as in the Isles of Aland, the rocks are all 
worn down on their north- north-western faces, and the stria; proceed from north-north-west to south- 
south-east. We therefore believe that the chief masses of granite in Courland have been derived from 
the Aland Isles. But even if this be so, the argument is just the same : indeed the case is more diffi- 
cult, if we are to imagine that glaciers advanced over the frozen Baltic from the Aland Isles to Mitau, the 
distance being much greater ! 
