POWERFUL ABRASION OF THE NORTH ENDS OF PROMONTORIES. 545 
proof of the stupendous denuding power of that great operation ; and when we look 
to the surface of those crystalline rocks themselves, still more are we astonished 
at the influence which must have been exerted. We now specially allude to the 
“ stoss seite,” or worn side of all the rocks exposed to the north, as contrasted 
with their natural or lee side. Without a personal visit to Sweden and without 
o 
crossing the Gulf of Bothnia, from Stockholm to Abo, we could, indeed, have 
formed no conception of the grandeur and uniformity of this phenomenon. We 
there threaded our way through hundreds of small isles, none of them rising to 
more than 60 or 100 feet above the Baltic Sea, and found that the north side of 
every one exposed a face, worn down, rounded, polished and striated, as if by a 
stupendous macerating weight, whilst every south face was abrupt and rough. On 
the one side, in short, all is mechanical, as if the surface had been planed down by 
art ; on the other all is rugged and natural. No one, we say, who has ever glanced 
at such marvellous and uniform appearances, would any longer contend, that they 
can have been produced by ordinary tides and currents. Nothing, in a word, short 
of the passage of an infinite number of heavy glaciers and their moraines, or of the 
coarse drift or osar current, which swept with it the great mass of the transition rocks 
into the plains of Germany, could have accomplished such mighty ends. The on- 
ward march of glaciers over these flat regions and seas being inadmissible, elevations 
of the Scandinavian continent are of course required to account for the waves of 
translation and powerful currents required for such a purpose ; for no gradual 
swellings of the land, such as those which are now going on in parts of that country, 
could possibly have produced such results. These can, indeed, alone have been 
accomplished by successive sudden upcasts, which threw off great devastating and 
erosive waves, and determined the currents in an uniform direction. But looking 
to the low altitude of Sweden, the vast erosion of its surface and the piles of loose 
materials by which it is encumbered, we can scarcely refrain from believing, that a 
great corresponding depression also took place, by which the regions of Russia in 
Europe, Poland and Germany, over which we have traced the northern drift, were 
so lowered as to cause long-continued currents to set in to the south from the 
Scandinavian chain. Such conditions, then, and those we have before suggested, 
may, we think, explain the boulder ridges, the wearing away and striation of the 
northern sides of the rocks in question and the passage of the rounded blocks, 
even though they occupy flat regions. 
In Sweden, however, it is essential to draw the distinction (as Sefstrom and Ber- 
i 
