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needs be impossible farther out than at the innermost fjord heads. The greatest distance between the heads of any two neighboring fjords on the whole Norwegian coast is only about 60 kilometers (less than 40 miles), and an ice stream driven out over this neck between Sognefjord and Nordfjord could not by any means reach a height of 510 meters at the isles in the mouth of Sognefjord, where we find glacial grooves and foreign boulders 1,760 meters, 5,700 feet above the fjord bottom. With only 20 to 30 kilometers to discharging outlets on each side, its thickness would ever be small. The fact must be kept in view that the inland ice behind, from which the ice stream flowed, had only a very inconsiderable breadth. The distance from the fjord heads to the present watershed is nowhere more than 30 kilometers, and the want of boulders transported from the country more to the east proves that the ice-shed, the glacial divide at the glacial period, could not have been situated far from the watershed. Now a névé less than 30 kilometers broad could never have pushed a continuous margin beyond a close set row of deep fjords. As we now in southern Norway actually find the whole west coast, except the highest points, very strongly glaciated, we are forced to admit that the only state of things in which the ice could have advanced so far west is to be found in a country where depressions, of a volume in any degree comparable with the present fjord system, are wanting. We are obliged to ascribe the formation of our fjords to Quaternary forces—that is, glacial erosion.

We know that boulders from the Kristiania fjord are found in the till as far away as North Netherlands and at Holderness, in England. We further know that the east-going ice flow in Scotland was turned back in Sutherland and that Orkney and Shetland were glaciated from the east, i.e., from Norway. A continuous inland ice could not have grown gradually across the deep Norwegian channel, which encircles southern Norway, the deep sea basin reaching 900 meters. As in the case of the fjords, we must also conclude that this fjord-like basin (which indeed does not reach the depth of some of the fjords) did not exist in preglacial times, but owes its origin to the ice stream that flowed