230 The Great Ice Age and Origin of the 84 Till.” [April-, 
with a third flood pouring through the Ofoten fjord, the Tys 
fjord, &c., from the mainland. The Vest fjord is about 
60 miles wide at its mouth, and narrows northward till it 
terminates in the Ofoten fjord, which forks into several 
branches eastward. A glance at a good map will show that 
here, according to my explanation of the origin of the till, 
there should be the greatest of all the submarine plains of 
till which the ancient Scandinavian glaciers have produced, 
and of which the plains of till I saw on the coast at Bodo 
(which lies just at the mouth of the Vest fjord, where the 
Satten fjord flows into it), are but the slightly inclined con- 
tinuation. 
Some idea of this bank may be formed from the fadt that 
outside of the Lofodens the sea is 100 to 200 fathoms in 
depth, that it suddenly shoals up to 16 or 20 fathoms on 
the east side of these rocks, and this shallow plain extends 
across the whole 50 or 60 miles between these islands and 
the mainland.* It must not be supposed the fjords or inlets 
of Scandinavia are usually shallower than the open sea ; the 
contrary is commonly the case, especially with the narrowest 
and those which run farthest inland. They are very much 
deeper than the open sea. 
If space permitted I could show that the great Storregen 
bank, opposite Aalesund and Molde, where the Stor fjord, 
Mold fjord, &c., were the former outlets of the glaciers from 
the highest of all the Scandinavian mountains, and the several 
banks of Finmark, &c., from which in the aggregate are 
taken another 20 or 30 millions of cod-fish annually, are all 
situated just where theoretically they ought to be found. 
The same is the case with the great bank of Newfoundland 
and the banks around Iceland, which are annually visited by 
large numbers of French fishermen from Dunkerque, Bou- 
logne, and other ports. 
Whenever the packet halted over these banks during our 
coasting trip we demonstrated their fertility by casting a line or 
two over the bulwark. No bait was required, merely a double 
* The celebrated “ maelstrom ” is one of the currents that flow down the 
submarine incline between these islands when the tide is falling. Although 
I have ridiculed some of the accounts of this now innocent stream, I am not 
prepared to assert that it was always as mild as at present. If the ancient 
glaciers were stopped suddenly, as they may well have been, by the rocky 
barrier of Mosken, between Vaero and Moskeneso, and they then suddenly 
concluded their deposition of till, a precipice must have been formed between 
this and the deep sea outside the islands, down which the sea would pitch 
when the tide was falling, and thus form some dangerous eddies. This cascade 
would gradually obliterate itself by wearing down the precipitous wall to an 
inclined plane such as at present exists, and down which the existing current 
flows. 
I 
