Page:Natural History Review (1861).djvu/507

Rh surrounded a single tent, being in the form of an irregular ring, enclosing a space on which the tent or tents probably stood, and which is now occupied by a mill. In other cases, where the deposit is of greater extent, the surface is undulating, the greater thickness of the shelly stratum in some places apparently indicating the arrangement of the dwellings. These two settlements were by no means the only ones on the Isefjord; in the neighbourhood of Roeskilde, Kjökkenmöddings occur near Gjerdrup, at Kattinge, and Kattinge Værk, near Trallerup, at Gjershöi, and opposite the island of Hyldeholme; besides several farther north, Others have been found on the islands of Fyen, of Moen, and of Samsoe, and in Jutland along Liimfjord, Mariagerfjord, Randersfjord, Kolindsund, and Horsensfjord. The southern parts of Denmark have not yet been carefully examined. Generally it is evident that deposits of this nature were scattered here and there over the whole coast, and that they were never formed inland. The whole country would appear to have been more intersected by fjörds during the Stone period even than it is now. Under these circumstances it is evident that a nation which subsisted principally on marine shellfish would never form any large inland settlements. In some instances indeed Kjökkenmöddings have been found as much as eight miles from the present coast, but in these cases there is good reason for supposing that the land has encroached on the sea. On the other hand, in those parts where Kjökkenmöddings do not occur, their absence is no doubt occasioned by the waves having to a certain extent eaten away the shore, an explanation which accounts for their being so much more frequent on the shores of the inland fjords than on the coast itself, and also deprives us of all hope of finding any similar remains on our eastern and south-eastern shores, though an examination of the western Coast would be very desirable. The fact that the majority of these deposits are found at a height of only a few feet above the sea appears to prove that there has been no considerable subsidence of the land since their formation, while on the other hand it clearly proves that there can have been no elevation. In certain cases, however, where the shore is elevated, they have been found at a considerable height. It might indeed be supposed that where, as at Bilidt, the materials of the Kjökkenmödding were rudely interstratified with sand and gravel, the land must have sunk, but if for any length of time such a deposit was subjected to the action of the waves, all traces of it would be obliterated, and it is therefore probable that an explanation is rather to be found in the fact that the action of waves and storms was greater then than now. At present the tides only affect the Kattegat to the extent of about a foot and a half, and the configuration of the land protects it very much from the action of the winds. On the other hand, on the west coasts of Jutland the tides rise about nine feet, and the winds have been known to produce differences of level amounting to 29 feet, and as we know that Jutland was anciently an archipelago, and that the Baltic was more