Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/75

Rh are now sixty feet higher than the surface of the Baltic. In the neighbourhood of these recent strata, both to the northwest and south of Stockholm, other deposits similar in mineral composition occur, which ascend to greater heights, in which precisely the same assemblage of fossil shells is met with, but without any intermixture, so far as is yet known, of human bones or fabricated articles.

On the opposite or western coast of Sweden, at Uddevalla, post-tertiary strata, containing recent shells, not of that brackish water character peculiar to the Baltic, but such as now live in the Northern Ocean, ascend to the height of 200 feet; and beds of clay and sand of the same age attain elevations of 300 and even 600 feet in Norway, where they have been usually described as 'raised beaches.' They are, however, thick deposits of submarine origin, spreading far and wide, and filling valleys in the granite and gneiss, just as the tertiary formations, in different parts of Europe, cover or fill depressions in the older rocks.

Although the fossil fauna characterising these upraised sands and clays consists exclusively of existing northern species of testacea, it is more than probable that they may not all belong to that division of the post-tertiary strata which we are now considering. If the contemporary mammalia were known, they would, in all likelihood, be found to be referable, at least in part, to extinct species; for, according to Lovén (an able living naturalist of Norway), the species do not constitute such an assemblage as now inhabits corresponding latitudes in the German Ocean. On the contrary, they decidedly represent a more arctic fauna. In order to find the same species nourishing in equal abundance, or in many cases to find them at all, we must go northwards to higher latitudes than Uddevalla in Sweden, or even nearer the pole than Central Norway.

Judging by the uniformity of climate now prevailing from