ined
stationary for the last eight centuries. The area of this isle does not
exceed that of a small village, and by an official survey, its highest
point has been determined to be twenty-three feet above the mean
high-water mark, that is, the mean between neap and spring tides. Now,
a monastery was founded there by Canute the Great, A. D. 1028, and
thirty-three years before that time it was in use as a common place of
execution. According to the assumed average rate of rise in Sweden
(about forty inches in a century), we should be obliged to suppose that
this island had been three feet eight inches below high-water mark when
it was originally chosen as the site of the monastery.

Professor Keilhau of Christiania, after collecting the observations of
his predecessors respecting former changes of level in Norway, and
combining them with his own, has made the fact of a general change of
level at a modern period, that is to say, within the period of the
actual testaceous fauna, very evident. He infers that the whole country
from Cape Lindesnaes to Cape North, and beyond that as far as the
fortress of Vardhuus, has been gradually upraised, and on the southeast
coast the elevation has amounted to more than 600 feet. The marks which
denote the ancient coast-line are so nearly horizontal that the
deviation from horizontality, although the measurements have been made
at a great number of points, is too small to be appreciated.

More recently (1844), however, it appears from the researches of M.
Bravais, member of the French scientific commission of the North, that
in the Gulf of Alten in Finmark, the most northerly part of Norway,
there are two distinct lines of upraised ancient sea-coast, one above
the other, which are not parallel, and both of them imply that within a
distance of fifty miles a considerable slope can be detected in such a
direction as to show that the ancient shores have undergone a greater
amount of upheaval in proportion as we advance inland.[739]

It has been already stated, that, in proceeding from the North Cape to
Stockholm, the rate of upheaval diminishes from several feet to a few
inches in a century. To the south of Stockholm, the upward movement
ceases, and at length in Scania, or the southernmost part of Sweden, it
appears to give place to a movement in an opposite direction. In proof
of this fact, Professor Nilsson observes, in the first place, that there
are no elevated beds of recent marine shel