well. But the Scotch examples of Loch Fyne, Loch Long, and the smaller but gloomier Loch Hourn, are admirable for our present purpose. The walls of a fjord come down steeply to the water, and are continued similarly below. The narrow inlet, with its great depth of water, resembles a flooded ravine among the mountains. Often the mouth is shallower than some portion farther inland, the great Hardanger Fjord of Norway being about 190 fathoms deep at its entry and 440 fathoms in certain spots within; and the depth inside is not related to the depth of the outer sea. Loch Etive, one of the grandest of the British fjords, has an outlet not 3 fathoms deep, set with rocky islets; but soundings give 76 fathoms off Port an Dòbhrain, which is a good twelve miles up the inlet. Clearly hollows such as these cannot result from the battery of the waves. Sitting on the heathery brae-side above Loch Hourn, and looking up to the rain-swept mountains of Glen Quoich, we see the fjord winding like a sheet of silver between the great masses of the hills. The wild flowers and ferns climb along the banks and touch the water's edge; there is all the tranquillity of a lake, and only in the seaweeds do we catch some suggestion of the sea. At the head of Loch Duich, again, in the purple highland of Kintail, the alluvial floors of Glen Shiel and Glen Lichd come down into the two arms of the water, and the sea-inlet is seen to be perfectly continuous with these valleys. In fact, fjords are nothing else than valleys lowered beneath the sea; the rivers carved them out, and the sea was let slowly into them. Sometimes the moraine of an old glacier lay across the mouth and shallowed it; sometimes the bending of the earth was not regular, and the valley-floor was actually lowered to a greater depth than the sea-floor outside. On the flanks of many fjords, raised beaches can be seen, showing that a sort of see-saw movement has taken place, now of subsidence, now of elevation. This beautiful feature of a mountainous coast is due, then, to a sinking of the land into the sea; and earth-movements have again been the chief factor in determining the coastline. Outside the fjords there are generally numbers of islets, running in lines away to sea. These are the crests of partly submerged ridges, being in many cases merely the continuation of the valley-wall on either hand. Lismore, lying in the mouth of Loch Linnhe, is a ridge that formerly divided the greater valley from a smaller southern one; the sea has entered both and has overflowed the col between them. To the west of the north-east point of Lismore the sea has a depth of 54 fathoms; to the east, on the old col, it is only 3 to 6 fathoms, with sand-banks gathered around projecting islets. The mountainous back of Jura is, again, the wall of a great valley, the opposite side of which is still seen in Knapdale and Kintyre; and the island of Arran itself is an outlying block of the western flank of a valley that stretched from Galloway to the south foot of the Grampians near Dalmally. The channel to the west of Arran is a second roughly parallel valley, the col which once divided it from Loch Fyne being some 40 fathoms under water; while the main valley to the east of Arran has its floor submerged pretty regularly to 80 or 90 fathoms. Glaciers filled most of these long hollows and kept them clear from débris, gradually shrinking away, as they have done in Norway also. At present the deltas of highland rivers are encroaching on the upper waters of the fjords, while the sea is depositing banks across their narrow mouths. considering marine soundings, we must remember that the form of the old rocky floor is often hidden by these later accumulations. In The study of fjords will lead us on and on to consider still greater features of the world. All round the British Isles accurate soundings have been made, and we know that we stand upon the edge of a great continental plateau, the western side of which drops steeply into the Atlantic. The line marking a depth of 100 fathoms upon our charts passes from the coast of Norway outside the Shetlands and the Outer Hebrides, runs from 25 to 100 miles distant from the west coast of Ireland, and then curves down to Biarritz and continues on close against the Spanish coast. One hundred miles west of County Mayo, in Ireland, we reach a depth of as much as 1400 fathoms, and 300 miles west of Kerry we find 2700 fathoms, or more than 3 miles. Here, then, we are fairly in the ocean; but the British Isles lie entirely to the east of it, and are in no way surrounded by it. If we return across Ireland, the channel between Stranraer and Larne has a depression reaching 140 fathoms, and 83 fathoms are found between Dublin and Holyhead. Gene rally speaking, the hollow between Ireland and England is only 50 fathoms (300 feet) deep. The English Channel, again, at Dover reaches 30 fathoms in a few local holes, and is mostly only 20 fathoms deep. The broad North Sea, but for a deep channel close to the Norwegian coast (160 to 300 fathoms), measures rarely as much as 50 fathoms. So that our islands may be regarded as distinctly European, and an elevation of 600 feet would cause an extension of the continent as a broad north-western promontory, bounded by a reduced Bay of Biscay on the south and the narrow Norwegian channel, above mentioned, on the northeast. The whole of the British Isles, including St. Kilda, would become parts of the mainland by such a movement. A uniform uplift of half this amount, of 50 fathoms or 300 feet, would join Ireland to Wales by a tongue of land between County Wicklow and Merionethshire, would bridge the gap from Donegal to Argyll, and would leave a long salt-lake from off Lough Foyle to the south of Dublin. The English Channel would be obliterated, and one could walk from any point on the east coast of England direct to any point in Denmark or in Holland. One or two little salt-lakes would alone remain of our southern and Eastern English seas. The similarity of the wild land-animals of the British Isles to those of the Continent shows that a connexion must certainly have existed in comparatively recent times. Moreover, Ireland possesses some twenty-one species of mammals, Britain has forty species, and Germany as many as ninety. Allowing for the fact that certain species may have been killed off by their enemies in the restricted space of an island more easily than on a continent, where they could freely come and go, yet these figures show that Ireland was cut off by subsidence from Britain while the latter was still united to the Continent. Mammalian species continued thus to reach England from the east, and then this area was also separated from the Continent. The westward migration of mammalian forms was thus checked by the Straits of Dover, which since then may have undergone many modifications, both in width and outline. Numerous traditions of sunken land occur, pointing to a former extension of the British group of islands westward of their present boundaries. The fjords are almost all upon the Atlantic coast; and the steep little cone of Rockall, some 200 miles west of the Outer Hebrides, and the submerged Porcupine Bank, 150 miles beyond the Galway coast, yet coming within 85 fathoms of the surface, are doubtless relics of broader ancient continents. An island, Hy Brasil, is shown in about the position of the Porcupine Bank on a French map of 1640,1 and I have found it marked even on a chart showing Nelson's voyages, which was published in 1815. The real date of its disappearance remains uncertain. (From a photograph by Mr. C. Green; by permission of the Council Thus, as we walk back to the white houses of the fishingvillage, and again look away over the curve of the bay, to the great cliff dominant beyond, we realise more than ever the shifting nature of the line where the land meets the sea. Not only does the water wear back the coast, and thrust itself away at other points by building ramparts of pebbles and seasand, but forces more mysterious and far-reaching are at work, elevating the whole border of a continent, or letting the sea into the complexities of its denuded surface. What we call the coast is a line of uncertainty and oscillation; and the rocks which border on it can surpass the oldest fisherman in the harbour, in telling us strange and eventful stories of the sea. 1 W. Frazer, "On Hy Brasil," Journ. Roy. Geol. Soc. Ireland, vol. v., p. 128. As to the traditional "sunken land of Buss," between Greenland and Rockall, see G. C. Wallich, "The North Atlantic Sea-Bed" (1862), pp. 63-69. On Rockall, see report in Trans. Roy. Irish Acad., vol. xxxi. (1897), p. 39. CHAPTER V ACROSS THE PLAINS A FLAT Country offers comparatively little attraction in itself, but derives most of its beauty from the expanse of air and sky. Beauty it certainly has, but of a kind so vast and indescribable that one has to live in the midst of it to feel its full meaning and its force. The greatness of the level finally comes home to one, especially if some well-known range of hills looms faintly into sight, forming a mere thin blue band on the farthest rim of the horizon. The landscape, as we move through it, is breathed in as a whole; where the details are all so much alike, they all seem equally insignificant. The Fenland of eastern England is one of these great expanses, which at first seem almost wearisome, even to the bicyclist who skims so easily across them. From Cambridge northward to the estuary of the Wash, there are forty-five miles of level ground, with thirty or so more if we cross the inlet at Fosdyke and penetrate the heart of Lincolnshire. Between the scattered villages lie areas of black peat, covered with coarse grass and dug into here and there for fuel. The roads are carried along the crests of broad embankments, with dark little drainage-cuts on either side of them, crossed by bridges to the fields. A few trees cluster round the old farm-houses, protecting them from the winds that sweep across the fenland steadily for weeks together, now chill and biting from the eastern sea, now stronger and moister from the west of England and the Atlantic. The sky is usually full of great cumulusclouds, dark grey below and silvery white above, where the sunlight strikes through them in long shafts across the greygreen plain. A church-tower or a windmill is visible ten miles away, when touched on by these sudden gleams; then it sinks back again into the great gloom of the horizon. Far in the south the hills beyond Cambridge may be visible, |