544 THE OSARS HAVE STRIATED AND WORN THE SWEDISH ROCKS. 
against the northern sides of the hills, could have produced such grinding, polishing 
and abrading results. The position and form of the osars he explained by supposing, 
that the force of the deluge being exhausted upon each of these promontories whose 
northern sides it wore down, “ stoss seite,” the waters had simply power to pile up 
the rude and rounded materials in lower lineal ridges, which being under the shelter, 
or “ lee side” of the hill, would thus be protected from the powerful efforts of the 
general current. 
We could not examine the materials of the great os close to Stockholm, nor of 
those adjacent to Upsala and other parts of Sweden without being convinced, that 
they never could have been accumulated by currents of like force and energy to 
those which now prevail in any part of the world. They all bespeak, that an enor- 
mous power has piled up such colossal heaps and completely rounded the blocks 
contained in them. By whatever force transported from north-north-west to south- 
south-east, or from north and by west to south and by east (for such are the linear 
directions of the principal Swedish osars), these masses, whose materials show that 
they have travelled over the low promontories of this country, could not, at all 
events, have been moved over that surface without producing extraordinary denu- 
dation of the subjacent rocks. And what does Sweden exhibit? A crystalline 
nucleus of ancient gneiss, or granite worn down, ground and polished, in the very 
direction in which the drift has moved ; nay, more, from the outliers of Silurian 
strata, often horizontal, which remain as islets of denudation, perched upon this 
broad crystalline expanse, we know that beds, so similar in composition, contents 
and position at distant and intermediate places, must once have had a very wide 
continuance over the low lands of Sweden. But such has been the force of 
erosion and the power of drift, that °f ^ iese deposits have been borne away 
and lodged either in the depression of the Baltic Sea or carried into the plains of 
Germany ; innumerable fragments of them with many Silurian fossils having been 
transported to the low grounds of Brunswick 1 and Prussia, &c. So much Silurian 
spoil has been spread over these tracts, that if swept back to Sweden it would 
indeed, to a great extent, fill up the interstices between the detached masses of the 
denuded strata of that country. 
This grinding down, as it were, to the earliest-formed solid rocks, is in itself a 
1 See Kloden’s work on the fossils of the March of Brandenburg and northern German plains. All 
these fossils have been transported from Sweden. (Versteinerungen der Mark Brandenburg. Berlin, 
1834 .) 
